Facebook has been suppressing the United States conservative political information while they manage to compile a trending article section upon their website.
This globe-wide social networking website has implied that they are pondering the idea for creating a section that will appear along the right hand side of Facebook’s website. This section is chosen by crunching data upon a stories popularity as well as timeline status. However, a former contract worker for Facebook that has worked with a team for this new section had stated the stories are reported to be filtered by real human curators, just like we can expect from homepages of popular news websites.
The reported, ex-journalist, has revealed the regularly exclusion of the United States conservative topics for this new section, even if the topics where trending on their main social network.
“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” stated a curator that has been identified as a political conservative, and reported to the popular site “Gizmodo”.
The same source also stated;
“Depending upon who was on the shift, things would be blacklisted or trending. Popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or they had a bias against it.”
Now allegedly suppressed major news topics that are in relations to other known conservative figures, such as those from “American News Aggregator”, “The Drudge Report”, and politicians Mitt Romney and even Rand Paul.
It is known that there are vigorous guidelines that have been set into action for the Facebook’s review team in order to ensure the consistency and neutrality. Those same guidelines are not permitted into the suppression of political perspectives, and they are not held in order to permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another viewpoint of one’s news outlet from another news outlet.
By now, it is no surprise, that this social network giant has a long history of conducting social experiments upon their large amount of active users for political campaigns. During the past six-years, Facebook users has been using Facebook’s “I’m Voting” button in order to encourage people to vote during the several elections. In the 2012 Presidential Election, a study conducted by the researcher at the University of California, has shown evidence that Facebook users have actually increased the voter turnout by a little more than 340,000 people during a 2010 congressional election. This was performed by displaying political messages all over Facebook exposing the messages to over 61 million Facebook Users.
It was during a recent Facebook’s recent “Developer Conference” that the CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was acting unusually outspoken. He would indirectly criticize the Republican Presidential runner-up saying;
“I hear fearful voices calling for building walls and distancing people they label as ‘others,’ Mark went on saying;
‘I hear them calling for blocking free expression for slowing immigration, for reducing trade, and in some cases, even for cutting access to the internet.”
The popular news outlet, Gizmodo, had even reported that the employees of Facebook are seriously questioning if they have a moral responsibility in order to prevent the victory of Donald Trump in the 2017 campaign by using the Facebook platform. However, this Silicon Valley giant is persistent in denying their attempts in order to influence people upon how they choose to vote.
Facebook rises as new news sources unfold.
The bias of the news section upon Facebook’s social network may actually have a dramatic consequences for the consumption of news articles across the globe. However, researchers from the “Pew Center” has shown that there has been a rise in Americans accessing news articles has grown from 47% in 2013, to 63% in 2015.
The fact of the matter is, the research conducted at Facebook has found that the politics was indeed particularly important to those of the users of Facebook. Thus resulting in 32% of the users would post about politics and government, then the other 61% between the ages of 20-35 would actually obtain their political news from Facebook every week.
It is becoming clear that the usage of Facebook news section is starting to become a priority. Facebook has even rolled out a wide range of tools that design in order to make the news consumption upon Facebook just a bit easier. This also includes tools such as “Instant Articles”, “Live Video”, and even the “Save for Later” button. There are also other options such as “Update Newsfeed” algorithms that can priorities the quality of related articles and even the length of time that has been spent reading those articles.
So how does the new trending section actually work?
Facebook news review team does not manually select any types of sources or content manually, they do create the writing of the topic descriptions and then double check each and every trending topic.
Ex-Facebook employees that worked upon the “Trending” team had also allegedly injected stories that the trending news team had deemed important. Regardless if the articles were not actually trending on the site.
In the case of the disappearance of flight MH370, the Charlie Hebdo attacks upon Paris and even the news about Black Lives Matter movement based inside of the United States has been said that the articles have been injected into the trending side bar for all to see.
A former curator of Facebook stated;
“We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook.”
While another ex-curator of Facebook also commented;
“If a story looked like it had enough news sites covering it, we could inject it – even if it wasn’t naturally trending.”
The social giant had allegedly insured their employees were cautious about over-promoting stories that are in any way related to the social network itself that can be viewed upon the Trending News Box. Facebook has also denied any claims that they utilize the influence in order to manipulate the democratic process.
While that being said, the news curators that are indeed working for the social giant has full access to a wide ranging list of stories that are trending upon the site. And the employees that had once worked for Facebook had to choose the stories that are believed to be the most interesting and then summaries the articles, write a headline, and then proceed onto posting them into the Trending module.
Facebook is not the only social giant in Silicon Valley that has developed a news creation team. In fact Twitter and Apple has created their own journalist team that is dedicated into working behind their Moments section (Twitter Based) and even the Apple News (Apple based) sections.
Sources: Telegraph {} Gizmodo {} Facebook {} Fowler.UCSD.EDU {} F.B. Developer Conference {} Pew Center
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