Whistleblower: Facebook Blacklisting Conservative News

MRCTV Contributor | May 9, 2016
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Facebook routinely suppressed conservative news stories or topics that could potentially benefit Republican positions from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

These new allegations were revealed last week, and today, more details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team -- a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site -- have come to light. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful and influential real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users -- 167 million in the U.S. alone -- are reading at any given moment.

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said a former curator. He added, “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”

The blacklisted topics included Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Chris Kyle, the former Navy sniper who was murdered in 2013, and stories from the Drudge Report.

Facebook Blacklist Conservative News? from PeerDaily on Vimeo. Written by Sarah Price.

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