Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

[Wilikon]

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.


Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

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.”

These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.
“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” 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. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

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. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.
“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter.”

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)

When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”

(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)

“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”

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

Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusses whether it should use that power to influence presidential elections.

“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”


http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006

[Evildrum]

Facebook has gotten way to big for its britches,was going to post this as well but was thinking their was already a similar thread on the topic of facebook censoring their platform. The bigger they become the more we are going to see them using their to push discussion down a planned narrative. Always get a kick out of the left when they end up just as bad as the far right.
They seem to suffer from what is good for you is what we allow you to see.

[Wilikon]

Facebook has gotten way to big for its britches,was going to post this as well but was thinking their was already a similar thread on the topic of facebook censoring their platform. The bigger they become the more we are going to see them using their to push discussion down a planned narrative. Always get a kick out of the left when they end up just as bad as the far right.
They seem to suffer from what is good for you is what we allow you to see.

The concept of "far right" or "far left" is not new or unique. A group of humans will always believe they have the right to control other humans, and what they believe does not count. The concept is part of us, changing its name every 1.5 centuries or so. This is confusing when you see the left supporting a pro war woman right now, but not much if you realize you need to forget labels and listen and watch their actions.


The difference between "far right" or "far left" becomes blurry. Not so when you see it a quest for total control.

[Moloch2]

That's good news because conservatism is the cancer of the earth and clinton will ban it when she becomes the next president

[criptix]

Facebook has gotten way to big for its britches,was going to post this as well but was thinking their was already a similar thread on the topic of facebook censoring their platform. The bigger they become the more we are going to see them using their to push discussion down a planned narrative. Always get a kick out of the left when they end up just as bad as the far right.
They seem to suffer from what is good for you is what we allow you to see.

The concept of "far right" or "far left" is not new or unique. A group of humans will always believe they have the right to control other humans, and what they believe does not count. The concept is part of us, changing its name every 1.5 centuries or so. This is confusing when you see the left supporting a pro war woman right now, but not much if you realize you need to forget labels and listen and watch their actions.


The difference between "far right" or "far left" becomes blurry. Not so when you see it a quest for total control.

Its funny that the other guy wants to use nuke against europe and The middle east but the woman ist nevertheless much more evil

[Wilikon]

Facebook MADE #BlackLivesMatter Artificially Trend By Inserting It Into News Feeds Manually


Facebook staff manually inserted the “Black Lives Matter” topic into its trending news feed in order to artificially boost the movement’s popularity and in turn boost the Facebook brand, according to a former employee who curated news for the site.

“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the former curator told Gizmodo. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics.”


http://dailycaller.com/2016/05/09/facebook-made-black-lives-matter-trend-by-inserting-it-into-news-feeds/?utm_campaign=atdailycaller&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social

[Evildrum]

The line of thought appeals to me and I will make a effort to choose my words more in line with how I perceive the world.
Its funny I never really thought to much about the choice of words but I have spent a lot of time thinking about the dynamics.
One of those blinder issues I guess,thanks for pointing that one out to me.

[Wilikon]

The line of thought appeals to me and I will make a effort to choose my words more in line with how I perceive the world.
Its funny I never really thought to much about the choice of words but I have spent a lot of time thinking about the dynamics.
One of those blinder issues I guess,thanks for pointing that one out to me.

Lots of people are paid to make you forget about this. Retrain your mind to ask "why" and "who" all the time... Especially with everything you read from a 1956 robot called "Wilikon"...

 

[by.Szun]

Interesting, since just last month, Facebook employees wanted to ask Zuckerberg about what, if any, imperative they had as a company to prevent a Trump presidency. http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990

I'm not entirely surprised, to be honest. It's the same as an editorial board at a newspaper, deciding which pieces to run from a wire service. This is just on a much, much larger scale. Still immensely unethical to do so, while still presenting yourself as neutral.

[eye-level]

That's good news because conservatism is the cancer of the earth and clinton will ban it when she becomes the next president

I think you must have it backwards...lol

[Wilikon]

Interesting, since just last month, Facebook employees wanted to ask Zuckerberg about what, if any, imperative they had as a company to prevent a Trump presidency. http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990

I'm not entirely surprised, to be honest. It's the same as an editorial board at a newspaper, deciding which pieces to run from a wire service. This is just on a much, much larger scale. Still immensely unethical to do so, while still presenting yourself as neutral.

That's the part I have a problem with. The lie. Be open instead. Tell everyone you support clinton.

But nah! "Neutral"

[Evildrum]

Seems to be the latest ploy to pass ones self off as neutral well attacking from the sidelines.
You can not claim to be neutral is you are swaying discussion towards a set outcome,but people will eat it up and think facebook is the greatest thing.
The media used to or they gave the perception of taking people to task. Now everything is pushed under the rug and they smile at you with puppy dog stories all the well knowing that people are dying,being mistreated or living in a sub human level to get by.
Are people waking up? More are unplugging cable but that may just mean they are watching game of thrones instead of looking into things for themselves. At first glance it looks like a waking up trend and then you realize people are just boob tubing their lives away.

[Wilikon]

Seems to be the latest ploy to pass ones self off as neutral well attacking from the sidelines.
You can not claim to be neutral is you are swaying discussion towards a set outcome,but people will eat it up and think facebook is the greatest thing.
The media used to or they gave the perception of taking people to task. Now everything is pushed under the rug and they smile at you with puppy dog stories all the well knowing that people are dying,being mistreated or living in a sub human level to get by.
Are people waking up? More are unplugging cable but that may just mean they are watching game of thrones instead of looking into things for themselves. At first glance it looks like a waking up trend and then you realize people are just boob tubing their lives away.

Yep.

[alphatv]

So Facebook is the deciding authority? Who have given them this role? Self Appointed

[Wilikon]

So Facebook is the deciding authority? Who have given them this role? Self Appointed

Us, non functioning brain facebook drones.

[danel]

This is something people need to learn: Facebook, Twitter, etc.- aren't free speech. They're corporate speech and they can takes sides. Be careful who you spend your time and money on.

[EUROPEANTURK]

That's good news because conservatism is the cancer of the earth and clinton will ban it when she becomes the next president

hillarry clinton will be the new president of the usa but conservatism will never be obliterated because american people have a tendency to be bigoted. hillary will be doomed to accept this reality.

[Wilikon]

Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show



Leaked documents show how Facebook, now the biggest news distributor on the planet, relies on old-fashioned news values on top of its algorithms to determine what the hottest stories will be for the 1 billion people who visit the social network every day.

The documents, given to the Guardian, come amid growing concerns over how Facebook decides what is news for its users. This week the company was accused of an editorial bias against conservative news organizations, prompting calls for a congressional inquiry from the US Senate commerce committee chair, John Thune.

The boilerplate about its news operations provided to customers by the company suggests that much of its news gathering is determined by machines: “The topics you see are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you’ve liked and your location,” says a page devoted to the question “How does Facebook determine what topics are trending?”

But the documents show that the company relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team to determine what makes its “trending module” headlines – the list of news topics that shows up on the side of the browser window on Facebook’s desktop version. The company backed away from a pure-algorithm approach in 2014 after criticism that it had not included enough coverage of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in users’ feeds.

The guidelines show human intervention – and therefore editorial decisions – at almost every stage of Facebook’s trending news operation, a team that at one time was as few as 12 people:

    A team of news editors working in shifts around the clock was instructed on how to “inject” stories into the trending topics module, and how to “blacklist” topics for removal for up to a day over reasons including “doesn’t represent a real-world event”, left to the discretion of the editors.
    The company wrote that “the editorial team CAN [sic] inject a newsworthy topic” as well if users create something that attracts a lot of attention, for example #BlackLivesMatter.
    Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority. “You should mark a topic as ‘National Story’ importance if it is among the 1-3 top stories of the day,” reads the trending review guidelines for the US. “We measure this by checking if it is leading at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo.”
    Strict guidelines are enforced around Facebook’s “involved in this story” feature, which pulls information from Facebook pages of newsmakers – say, a sports star or a famous author. The guidelines give editors ways to determine which users’ pages are appropriate to cite, and how prominently.

The company’s guidelines are very similar to a traditional news organization’s, with a style guide reminiscent of the Associated Press guide, a list of trusted sources and instructions for determining newsworthiness. (The Guardian also obtained the guidelines for moderating the “in the story” feature, now called “involved in this story”; the guidelines for the company’s Facebook Paper app; and a broader editorial guide for the app.)

The guidelines are sure to bolster arguments that Facebook has made discriminatory editorial decisions against rightwing media. Conservatives would label the majority of Facebook’s primary sources as liberal.

They also appear to undermine claims this week from Facebook’s vice-president of search, Tom Stocky, who posted a statement addressing the controversy on 9 May. “We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so,” he wrote.

Stocky’s statement may depend on the definition of the word “artificially”. In interviews with the Guardian, three former editors said they had indeed inserted stories that were not visible to users into the trending feed in order to make the experience more topical. All denied personal bias, but all said the human element was vital.

A second list, of 1,000 trusted sources, was provided to the Guardian by Facebook. It includes prominent conservative news outlets such as Redstate, Breitbart, the Drudge Report and the Daily Caller.

Former employees who worked in Facebook’s news organization said that they did not agree with the Gizmodo report on Monday alleging partisan misconduct on the part of the social network. They did admit the presence of human judgment in part because the company’s algorithm did not always create the best possible mix of news.

Specifically, complaints about the absence from trending feeds of news reports about clashes between protesters and police in Ferguson in 2014 were evidence to Facebook that – in the specific case of the trending module – humans had better news judgment than the company’s algorithm. Multiple news stories criticized Facebook for apparently prioritizing Ice Bucket Challenge videos over the riots. Many said the incident proved that Twitter was the place for hard news, and Facebook was a destination for fluff.

“The guidelines demonstrate that we have a series of checks and balances in place to help surface the most important popular stories, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum,” said Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice-president of global operations. “Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any political origin, period. What these guidelines show is that we’ve approached this responsibly and with the goal of creating a high-quality product – in the hopes of delivering a meaningful experience for the people who use our service.

“Trending Topics uses a variety of mechanisms to help surface events and topics that are happening in the real world. In our guidelines, we rely on more than a thousand sources of news – from around the world, and of all sizes and viewpoints – to help verify and characterize world events and what people are talking about. The intent of verifying against news outlets is to surface topics that are meaningful to people and newsworthy. We have at no time sought to weight any one viewpoint over another, and in fact our guidelines are designed with the intent to make sure we do not do so.”


https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-trending-news-leaked-documents-editor-guidelines



--------------------------------------------
Facebook' secret news algorithm: 10 people in a office, surfing the net.

 

[Evildrum]

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/google-faces-record-3-billion-euro-eu-antitrust-150203063--finance.html
Google faces record 3 billion euro EU antitrust fine: Telegraph

When/if the public pushes back there will be a steep drop off for google, facebook and Yahoo.
Think there is room for a alternative that does not datamine, stalk and manipulate data.

[mOgliE]

And so ?

Facebook is a private company. As all private companies they ve got their own point of view ont the world and they'll try to impose it to you. Why people fighting for a free capitalistic society are even surprised by the fact that companies don't give a fuck about truth or objectivity?