Report: Facebook Workers Suppressed Conservative Views

WAUKESHA — If you're a politically-conservative voter in the Metro Milwaukee area and a Facebook user, it turns out what you don't know can actually hurt you.

According to a recent report released by national technology blog Gizmodo, former Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section.

The "trending" news section helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

According to the article, a former Facebook employee said "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. "

It's estimated that nearly 600 million people read a news story each week, just because it was posted on Facebook. (you might actually be reading this based on a Facebook post made by Patch.com)

Based on Gizmodo's report, the implication here is that millions of Facebook users who are also voters were steered away from conservative viewpoints by specific member or members of a team with different political views.

Facebook Responds:

In a statement to TechCrunch May 9 in response to Gizmodo’s report that conservative trends were suppressed in Facebook’s Trending section, Facebook wrote:

“We take allegations of bias very seriously. Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.”

Walker Suppressed:

According to the Gizmodo article, one Facebook employee so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Here's the list of suppressed topics:

• 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
• former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder.

Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.

Read more on Gizmodo here.

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