Facebook Caught in the Middle of a Censorship Scandal Regarding US Politics

[WALLONN7]

Former employees accuse Facebook of ignoring conservative US politics news, promoting unpopular topics

 

Facebook denied accusations launched by former employees that said the company's staff working in its news curation department is actively suppressing news categorized as right-wing or conservative.

Yesterday, under the veil of anonymity, a former journalist who worked for Facebook's news curation department, along with several colleagues who also worked with him, decided to go public with their experience while at the company,

 

They told Michael Nunez, Gizmodo reporter, that some of Facebook's staff who were in charge of selecting which stories appear in Facebook's "Trending" section would regularly ignore actual trending topics, injecting other

stories into the Trending widget instead.

 

The former Facebook employees say that most of these ignored stories were of interest to the site's right-wing or conservative readership. Some of the news stories ignored include articles about Mitt Romney, Ted Cruz,

Steven Crowder, and from conservative news portal the Drudge Report.

 

Additionally, these same news curators were specifically instructed by Facebook to ignore any news about Facebook itself, and even inject news stories into the Trending section even if they were not trending at all at that

moment, the former employees said.

 

 

Facebook refutes all accusations

 

 

These direct accusations of active censorship did not go over Facebook's head. The company first said that it has guidelines in place that govern how articles should be moderated.

 

Seeing that criticism on behalf of the media and users did not stop, later during the day, Facebook VP Tom Stocky issued a new statement in which it made it clear that the company never engaged in such practices.

 

Stocky made it clear that any editing of trending news topics is done only to beautify the section, as in merge topics under one hashtag.

 

He even said that allegations that news curators boosted the #BlackLivesMatter topic were also false, saying Facebook specifically looked into the matter.

 

Here are some highlights from Stocky's statement. The full statement is available here.

 

 

Quote

“  Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we've designed our tools to make that technically not feasible," Stocky wrote on Facebook today. [...] We have in place strict guidelines for our trending topic reviewers as they audit topics surfaced algorithmically: reviewers are required to accept topics that reflect real world events, and are instructed to disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources.  Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we've designed our tools to make that technically not feasible. At the same time, our reviewers' actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.  ”

 

 

Source