The people responsible for updating Facebook’s “trending” news feature regularly omitted stories about politically conservative topics, according to a report at the technology blog Gizmodo.
So-called news “curators,” tasked with highlighting news items that are being frequently shared by Facebook users, would often bypass any news that dealt with Republican politics or conservative issues such as GOP candidates or high-profile conservative activists, according to the report.
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” a former Facebook worker told Gizmodo, though he was not identified in the report.
“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,” he said.
The Washington Examiner was one of a few news websites mentioned in the report.
“We’ve read the report, and it is obviously of considerable interest to us,” said Hugo Gurdon, the Examiner’s editorial director. “We plan on working with Facebook to ensure Washington Examiner‘s valuable content gets the attention it obviously deserves.”
The report said that topics potentially of interest to conservative Facebook users were often left off the “trending” chart. Those topics included “former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; [and] Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013.”
The Gizmodo report also said that links to stories published by conservative news outlets “were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC and CNN covered the same stories.”
And while conservative topics were often omitted from trending on Facebook, the report says that other curators admitted to being instructed to artificially insert some stories, regardless of their popularity, onto the trending chart.
That led to Facebook “boosting” stories dealing with the Black Lives Matter movement up onto the trending chart, even when they weren’t as popular as other topics.
In a statement released Monday, Facebook denied that its employees were intentionally suppressing any political content and that an algorithm is responsible for which topics appear in the “trending” space.
“There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality,” the statement said. “These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another.”
