By The Federalist Staff
Tuesday, May 03, 2016
If you’ve ever used Facebook, you’ve noticed the list of
trending topics on the vertical navbar along the right side of the page. You
may have even clicked one or two of them to see what’s happening or why the
topic is trending. What you probably didn’t know is that Facebook apparently
blacklists certain topics from showing up, or certain news outlets from having
their coverage seen by Facebook’s audience.
Gizmodo, a tech blog, talked to the people behind
Facebook’s news aggregation service–“news curators” in Facebookspeak–and it
turns out that Facebook’s news coverage isn’t based on fancy, unbiased
algorithms at all. Nope. Facebook’s news service is instead run by people who
want to make sure none of that icky right-wing coverage finds its way in front
of people’s eyeballs:
They were also told to select
articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like the
New York Times, Time, Variety, and other traditional outlets. They would
regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but
were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets. They were also
discouraged from mentioning Twitter by name in headlines and summaries, and
instead asked to refer to social media in a broader context.
News curators also have the power
to “deactivate” (or blacklist) a trending topic—a power that those we spoke to
exercised on a daily basis. A topic was often blacklisted if it didn’t have at
least three traditional news sources covering it, but otherwise the protocol
was murky—meaning a curator could ostensibly blacklist a topic without a
particularly good reason for doing so.
You read that correctly: Facebook’s news curators
regularly went out of their way to make sure coverage from conservative sites
like The Blaze rarely found its way
into Facebook’s coverage of trending news topics.
Facebook’s trending topic blacklist protocol is
especially egregious, because it gives its news curators multiple different
ways of preventing conservative news or conservative news outlets from ever
seeing the light of day. According to former news curators for the tech giant
who talked to Gizmodo, the company first determines who is and isn’t a
“preferred” news site. Based on that determination, the curators then have the
power to blacklist any trending topic that isn’t sufficiently covered by the
“preferred” sites.
Want to block coverage of the blockbuster Planned
Parenthood videos that showed how the abortion provider went out of its way to
harvest and traffic organs ripped from healthy, unborn babies, but without
explicitly blocking that particular topic? Easy: just pre-emptively exclude
organizations that covered the story from your list of preferred news
providers. Or, if that’s too much work, just manually manipulate the trending
topic so it tells the exact opposite story from the one that is actually
trending. And then, if anybody gets wise to the racket, just tell them the
choice was totally up to you and not dictated from above, as if that somehow
makes deliberate blacklisting or censorship perfectly acceptable.
We don’t have to just imagine that scenario unfolding,
though. Why? Because it actually happened.
Here’s what one pro-life activist noticed about
Facebook’s Planned Parenthood’s baby organ harvesting coverage last August:
I wasn’t particularly surprised to
see this afternoon that “Planned Parenthood” was listed as the #1 top-trending
topic on Facebook’s trending bar.
After all, my Facebook newsfeed was
packed to the seams with posts about the latest video, released this morning,
featuring the gruesome testimony from a former StemExpress employee about how
they harvested the brains of a baby while its heart was still beating at a
Planned Parenthood clinic.
But then I looked closer at
Facebook’s “trending” Planned Parenthood topic. And then I did a double take.
This is – laughable as it might seem – what the descriptor said: “U.S. State
inquiries into organization show no criminal evidence, report says.”
So I clicked on the “trending”
topic to see what it was all about.
There I found, featured at the top,
two posts by Planned Parenthood’s official Facebook page. The first post, with
a puny 2.6 thousand likes, linked to a Buzzfeed article that did include
mention of how some states that had investigated Planned Parenthood’s fetal
tissue donation program didn’t find anything amiss – because Planned Parenthood
doesn’t have a fetal tissue donation program in those states. In other words, a
non-story. The second post, with just over 3,000 likes, linked to a CapitalNewYork
article about how Florida was going to let three clinics caught performing
illegal 2nd trimester abortions to continue performing abortions.
After that there were a large
number of posts by my Facebook friends about today’s video, and then a bunch of
posts by random news websites, mostly about the video, although there was one
by The Guardian also claiming that state investigations haven’t turned up any
evidence of wrong-doing – again, because in those states tissue donation is
either illegal, or Planned Parenthood just doesn’t participate in tissue
donation there. That Guardian article has, as of this writing, just 4,600 likes
and shares.
By contrast, LifeSite’s one story
about today’s eye-opening video has over 50,000 likes and shares on Facebook,
and growing by the second. Breitbart’s article about the video (linked to by
the Drudge Report) has over 20,000 likes and shares. LiveActionNews’s story has
10,000. Young Conservatives has more than 18,000.
“I can’t help but ask,” the author of that post wrote.
“Is this a transparent case of Facebook misusing its authority to ‘create,’ or,
at the very least, hijack, a trending topic, to serve its own purposes?”
Now we know the answer, especially in light of the
confession by Facebook’s own news curators that they absolutely had the power
and authority to arbitrarily blacklist certain news topics. And that particular
activist isn’t the only one who noticed what was happening. Last July, Facebook
went so far as to block individual posts that mentioned Planned Parenthood’s
baby organ harvesting and trafficking schemes:
Earlier today, shocking video was
released that shows Planned Parenthood’s medical director bragging about the
harvest and sale of aborted baby organs and body parts. The news took social
media by storm, as people began furiously tweeting about and sharing the
horrifying story online.
It appears, however, that social
media giant Facebook is not a fan of the viral spread of the story. According
to Russell Moore, a top official with the Southern Baptist Convention, Facebook
is preventing his organization from sharing the story via Facebook.
Moore was not the only individual
prevented from sharing news of Planned Parenthood’s atrocities:
Facebook’s censorship of Moore’s
post is especially curious, since the only “offensive” aspect of Moore’s post
is the very procedure he’s describing: the deliberate murder of a healthy
unborn baby in order to harvest its body parts and sell them for profit. There
is no profanity. There is no graphic imagery. Yet for some reason Facebook
decided that the information was not fit to be posted or shared.
Facebook’s deliberate blacklisting of conservative
content and conservative outlets, as revealed by its own news curators in
charge of the process, shouldn’t come as any surprise. The only thing that is
surprising is why conservatives would trust organizations like Facebook to
provide honest and unbiased accounts of what’s happening in the world.
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