In May 2016, it was revealed that Facebook was discriminating against topics of interest to conservatives on its “Trending News” feature. A former employee of the team told Gizmodo that in addition to neglecting conservative trends, the company also suppressed stories about itself. And artificially promoted stories about the Black Lives Matter movement.27
According to Gizmodo, Facebook’s team of “news curators” were:
…Told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like The New York Times, Time, Variety, and other liberal mainstream outlets. They would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets.”28
A leaked document published in The Guardian later confirmed that Facebook would check against a list of preferred mainstream outlets (including BBC, New York Times, CNN and FOX) before assigning a story “national-level importance.”29 In other words, it was up to places like CNN to sign off on stories from right-leaning outlets. Can anyone spot the problem?
Facebook’s policy of discrimination against conservatives wasn’t mandated from the top down, but it didn’t need to be. Silicon Valley companies don’t have to institute policies of bias against conservatives—all they have to do is give minimal oversight to their overwhelmingly left-leaning employees, and turn a blind eye to the inevitable consequences.
And that’s exactly what Facebook did. “We choose what’s trending,” a former employee told Gizmodo. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.”
The source told Gizmodo exactly what this meant for conservative news, and for progressive news. In short, the former was suppressed (“deep-sixed,” according to internal Facebook jargon) while the latter was promoted. Again, from 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.
Meanwhile, according to the source, Facebook’s left-leaning staff pressured Mark Zuckerberg to use Facebook to help swing the election for Hillary Clinton, and blamed him for not doing enough after she lost.30 And as for Blacks Lives Matter, “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the source said. “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.
Facebook’s political bias scandal took place after Twitter’s, but unlike Twitter, Facebook actually matters to normal people, so it caused an instant response from politicians. A petition was created by the Republican National Committee, stating, “Facebook Must Answer For Conservative Censorship.”
Senator Jim Thune, then Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, also called on Facebook to explain itself: “If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm but is in fact subjective,” wrote Thune, then “Facebook’s assertion that it maintains ‘a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum’ misleads the public.”
Shocked by the response, Facebook leapt into action—they announced a whitewashing “internal report” (which of course found no wrongdoing at the company) and invited a bunch of establishment conservatives to a closed-door meeting at their Menlo Park headquarters.
Breitbart received an invitation to attend the meeting, but unlike S.E Cupp, Glenn Beck and other assorted establishment types, we declined to attend. The invitation was clearly only a photo op, and not a serious effort to engage with conservatives. Instead, I asked Mark Zuckerberg to answer, in a live debate with me, to the only group who mattered: the millions of conservatives who used his platform. He refused.
I’m a humble man—take a walk if you’re still laughing thirty seconds after reading that—I can handle not receiving attention, so my response to Facebook’s snub was characteristically gracious and mild. Along with Allum Bokhari, I wrote a series of stories exposing the wacky progressive views of Facebook’s Trending news team, leading to them all getting fired and replaced with a computer algorithm. You’re welcome, America.
Political activist Pamela Geller, who was banned from Facebook following the Muslim terrorist attack in Orlando, is also not letting the matter of Facebook’s bias stand. Geller is currently suing the company, and in an article for Breitbart, she explained why:
I am sick and tired of the suppression of our speech. We are unable to engage in the public square. And yes, Facebook is the public square; it’s where we connect. We have to fight for it. Shouting into the wilderness is not freedom of speech. My Facebook page has close to 300,000 followers, and combined with my pages (SIOA, SION, AFDI), the reach is another 100,000. It’s a critical connection.
Facebook has immense power over organic media—the sharing of our information and news between friends and associates. I would say too much power. They’re trying to change the people by restricting our access to information.31
Gun shop owners, immigration hawks, and admins of right-wing meme pages have also all faced censorship from Facebook.
Sadly, out of the leading web companies, Facebook is perhaps the best of the bunch. The impression I get from speaking to Facebook’s management behind closed doors is of a company trying desperately to rein in its own hyper-progressive employees. A report from The Wall Street Journal revealed that in the middle of the 2016 campaign, Mark Zuckerberg faced pressure from his community standards team to censor content from Donald Trump, whom they argued was engaging in “hate speech.” The team even threatened to quit if Trump wasn’t censored, but Zuckerberg reportedly held his ground.32
Zuckerberg also stood fast when faced with pressure to remove Trump supporter Peter Thiel from Facebook’s board, releasing a statement in support of political diversity:
We care deeply about diversity. That’s easy to say when it means standing up for ideas you agree with. It’s a lot harder when it means standing up for the rights of people with different viewpoints to say what they care about.33