Former Facebook employees who worked from mid-2014 to December 2015 say the social media platform headed by Mark Zuckerberg routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the “trending” news section.
A journalist who worked for Facebook told Gizmodo that employees averted stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, politicians Mitt Romney and Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from showing up in the section, even though they were organically trending.
Various former Facebook “news curators” claim they were ordered to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending section, even though they weren’t popular enough to be included or weren’t trending at all.
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator who asked to be anonymous.
“I‘d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” the former employee told Gizmodo.
Some topics that were downplayed were: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; conservative news site the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the Navy SEAL who was killed in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder.
“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator stated.
