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Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News (gizmodo.com)
Michael Nunez, reporting for Gizmodo: 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. In other words, Facebook's news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing -- but it is in stark contrast to the company's claims that the trending module simply lists "topics that have recently become popular on Facebook." The revelation comes amid a report on the same publication which claimed that a small group of journalists controlled and decided what should trend on Facebook. Also recently, a leaked screenshot revealed Facebook employees asking whether they should do something to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the president.
"Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”"
Ah, so they were censoring sources that were known to be bastions of conservative misinformation. Ah yes, beat the drums.One guy said "THEY WUZ CENSORSING MURICAN PINIONS" and a moderate said "Eh, what we really did was remove sources that we thought were overly biased and replaced with a more neutral source."
Oh my god, my moral barometer is shifting with the moon phases and you can't explain that. I'm just OUTRAGED. Liburaldumcrats are RAPING my ECHO CHAMBER BY NOT SPREADING MISINFORMATION!
Proof you are wrong, sir: Hugo Chávez won all his elections fair and square, according not just to himself but to former US president Jimmy Carter, who was quoted saying "Venezuela probably has the most excellent voting system that I have ever known".
Chávez' opposition, instead, organised riots, a coup against him, and he was so magnanimous as not to have them sentenced to death (which is undoubtedly what would be done in case anything remotely similar were to occur in the US; it's called treason).
Just because you don't like his policies, his attitude or his inept successor does not make the man a dictator. And by the way there are still elections scheduled in Venezuela, and it is likely Maduro is going to lose.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Newspapers - holy god, have you never read the WSJ?
I know something about the WSJ. I read them for 30 years. I was a journalist, I ran into their reporters, and I used to pick up stories from the WSJ all the time, adding my own reporting, and frequently interviewed/fact checked the same sources they interviewed.
For all that time, the WSJ had an uncanny reputation among left and right for objective, accurate, unbiased reporting that was not influenced by their advertisers or publisher. That was unusual in the news business. One of their reporters, A. Kent MacDougal, wrote a great article for Monthly Review about how he, as a socialist, could write anything he wanted as long as he backed it up with facts.
The great moment that established the WSJ's credibility was when in the 1950s they got a leak of General Motors' new cars, and GM didn't want them printed. GM threatened to cancel all their advertising in the WSJ if they printed it. The WSJ printed it. GM cancelled their ads. GM needed the WSJ more than the WSJ needed GM. GM finally came crawling back, and it was a long time before the WSJ took them back. There really aren't too many newspapers or magazines that would stand up to a major advertiser like that. I used to read stories on auto safety and pollution in the New York Times that were effectively censored by their auto advertisers. Ms. magazine throughout its history published cigarette ads (which according to Ms. advertising policy, were a seal of approval), while running stories on every cancer except lung cancer.
The reason for that, I concluded, was that the WSJ was owned by a wealthy family, the Bancrofts, who were politically liberal but believed in free speech and balanced journalism, and weren't out to maximize their profits. If every wealthy corporate owner was like the old Bancrofts, America would be a better country. But the next generation of Bancrofts were more interested in money than principle, and sold out to Rupert Murdoch. That's my great man/woman theory of journalism.
Under Murdoch, the WSJ has indeed become a corporate whore. I tried to give him a chance, but stopped subscribing when they started writing about "death taxes." Great journalism was worth $250 a year. Murdoch propaganda is worth zero.