Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers 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 right-wing 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.
this is an important story. the details here dont matter too too much, it’s gizmodo lol and theyre relying on one source. but the basic point is critical: facebook’s news Is partial and human and with political interest. facebook news is algorithmic just like fox news is fair and balanced, both appealing to a false neutrality.
eg, remember when Ferguson went down, and it filled your twitter, but facebook was full of ice bucket videos? i remember posting screenshots of my fb news not mentioning ferguson or BLM while the rest of the news media was wall to wall. well,
“That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module”
good on facebook for highlighting BLM into their news section! bad on them for pretending like that’s not journalism.
i wrote about some of this a year ago, “The most dangerous journalism is journalism that doesn’t see itself as such."
