Sources tell Gizmodo that Facebook routinely gundecked “conservative” news – spiking it from the “trending” news section, even if it was legitimately, y’know, trending (and buffing up stories that management wanted pushed):<\/p>\n
These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook\u2019s trending news team\u2014a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the \u201ctrending\u201d module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Tangential note: \u00a0you’re a young “journalist” with an Ivy-League degree. \u00a0You’re working as a “curator” for Facebook.<\/p>\n
Contact me. \u00a0I’ll refer you to a good suicide hotline. \u00a0You’re gonna need it sooner than later.<\/p>\n
I digress:<\/p>\n
\u201cDepending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,\u201d said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. \u201cI\u2019d come on shift and I\u2019d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn\u2019t be trending because either the curator didn\u2019t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It’s really no different than any newspaper. \u00a0Just big and financially successful.<\/p>\n
The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: 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; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. \u201cI believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,\u201d the former curator said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It does bespeak a certain insecurity, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n
(It also introduces a conundrum: \u00a0which do more hope to see crash and burn? \u00a0Facebook or Twitter?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sources tell Gizmodo that Facebook routinely gundecked “conservative” news – spiking it from the “trending” news section, even if it was legitimately, y’know, trending (and buffing up stories that management wanted pushed): These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook\u2019s trending news team\u2014a small group of young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tc-media-bias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58721"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58733,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58721\/revisions\/58733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}