Facebook’s corporate office is teeming with liberal employees who are simply unable to take a neutral view toward current events, according to a former staffer who explained the dynamics between allegations of bias in the site’s trending news section.
“Ninety percent of the team identified as liberal, including the copy editors, who essentially had the final approval on topics,” the unnamed former Facebook news curator said in an interview with DigiDay. “If a source came up that may have been less credible to a liberal reviewer, like Breitbart or another publication like that, it would require more extensive secondary sourcing.
“However, if there was an article that came from a more liberal-slanted publication, it was essentially given less critique and was a more viable topic from the get-go,” the source added.
After users noticed the bias in May, prompting uproar and a congressional inquiry, the site took corrective measures.
“Facebook actually put more checks in place to make sure that that wouldn’t happen. And it did kind of stop. They balanced it out in that those liberal publications came under more scrutiny. If there was a topic that could potentially be biased, they would require more eyeballs on it.
“They made changes to the algorithm itself, so less credible topics wouldn’t pop up into the feed. People paid a lot more attention. The writing style also got drier. Any headline with loaded adjectives, like ‘Hillary Clinton attacked for emails’ or something like that, they were more focused on changing the verbiage,” the former staffer said.
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The whistleblower said the way the trending news bar worked was a mystery even to many in the company, but that the sales department sometimes submitted requests to manipulate topics on behalf of advertising clients.
“It never seemed like anyone in the company ever actually understood what we did or understand how the topics were curated. There were times when another team was working with a client and they happened to be trending, and they would ask if we could add a video or something because the client expected that.
“They didn’t get that it would mean breaking that wall between editorial and business,” the former employee said. “We would sometimes end up acquiescing to their requests and adding that video, and I just felt like that broke journalism ethics.”
Facebook declined to comment on the interview. The site this month eliminated its human curation team, relying instead on an algorithm to set the topics and articles that it displays as trending news. The new system has experienced difficulties, causing some fake articles and topics to be displayed.
