REALity – Volume XXXV Issue No. 8 August 2016
The social media giant, Facebook, has been accused by former employees and contractors of suppressing conservative news stories.
This is very significant as there is no other single media outlet that comes anywhere near the outreach of Facebook. It has 1.5 billion users worldwide and 222 million monthly active users in the US and Canada. Young people today do not go to the print media or website institutions, but go to soundbites on social media, such as Facebook. According to a study by the Media Insight Project and the American Press Institute, 88% of millennials get news from Facebook regularly, and more than half of them do so daily. In other words, Facebook is the modern equivalent to a newspaper. The difference, however, is that readers usually know the slant of the stories in a mainstream media outlet, but the slant in Facebook has been hidden – until now.
In 2014, Facebook introduced a new feature by providing ongoing series of news stories on its “trending topics” sidebar. It appears to the right of the Facebook news feed. This feature supposedly identifies topics that have spiked in popularity.
Employees working on this site prioritize the stories to be shown on this sidebar, write the headlines, summarize each topic, and include links to the news sites from where they were obtained.
However, some of those who have worked on this site allege that the team in charge of the trending topics has wilfully blocked conservative news from appearing on the sidebar, even when the news was genuinely popular. According to these informants, the workers on this site “injected” liberal topics into the trending sidebar that weren’t even genuinely trending. They “cooked” the trend statistics to suppress information and ideas from conservative news sources. When a story originated on a conservative news website, these employees would also look for a link to the story from a liberal media website to place in the trending list, instead of the conservative website. This had the effect of suppressing traffic to conservative websites and provided a distorted, inaccurate understanding of the trends.
Evidence of this, namely that conservative news stories and news sites are suppressed and liberal topics elevated on Facebook, occurred when the Planned Parenthood baby parts video scandal broke out. After a long delay, Facebook finally reported it as a trending topic, but when it did, it failed to link the story to conservative sites; it linked to Planned Parenthood sponsored items instead. This greatly distorted and covered up the real story.
This distortion of trending topics is significant, not because Facebook does any actual reporting, (it doesn’t), but because it is the single biggest social network on the planet, growing bigger every day and where hundreds of millions of people see links to news.
This bias on Facebook is an indication of just how it has muscled its way into the political conversation. Facebook is not a reliable source since now it distorts the news. However, as we are now aware of this problem on Facebook, we should view its information with considerable scepticism.