Facebook, Your Friends, or You? Who Actually Is in Control of What You See on Facebook?
A number of conservative news websites – including Restoring Liberty – contend that Facebook is censoring their stories. While difficult to prove, there have been several recent studies suggesting that Facebook is indeed biased through either its algorithm controlling users’ news feeds or through deliberate action. This is particularly disturbing as increasing numbers of Americans – and people across the world – now use Facebook as their primary news source.
In an astonishing smoking-gun-story earlier this month, Gizmodo uncovered reports that Facebook used journalists to help shape the “trending” section of their website to specifically prevent conservative stories from making it to that prominent location. Not only did Facebook prevent trending conservative stories from making the prominent list, but it also added non-trending leftist stories to the list!
Facebook misleadingly suggests that its trending section is based only on personal interest and what is currently popular on Facebook. What’s conveniently omitted is the subjective human influence on what ultimately makes the list. While Facebook contends it has strict policies in place to prevent bias, there’s little question that it has failed in avoiding human interference. It also raises the question whether other sections of Facebook have been shaped with “help” from human touch to prevent conservative stories from getting fair coverage.
Outside of the trending news section, there are many other examples of Facebook censoring information. In one recent example, Facebook was caught deleting and preventing posts about another social media website (tsu.co) which it alleged was spam. Facebook obviously saw a competitive threat from tsu.co, a platform that gives an astonishing 90% of ad profits back to users. In another example, Facebook blocked conservative Professor Carol Swain’s Facebook account for “abusive content” only to reinstate it once the censoring was made known by breitbart.com.
Another troubling example of Facebook’s political bias is the case of Syrians who had pages removed by Facebook from their account, causing them to lose many pictures and other documentation of war crimes. But sometimes the bias is more explicit. At a recent UN event, German Chancellor Merkel was overheard asking CEO Zuckerberg how Facebook was doing on suppressing “racist” posts against the recent influx of refugees.
Some victims of Facebook censoring are fighting back. For instance, an Israeli group (NGO Shurat HaDin, also known as the Israeli Law Center) created an experiment to test the theory that Facebook is prejudiced against Israel. The ingenious, simple experiment was done by creating two Facebook pages similar in so-called “hate content,” with one against Israel and the other against Palestine. Users then reported both pages to Facebook as violating the social media giant’s hate speech standards. Within one day of reporting the page against Palestine, it was removed from Facebook. However, the other page against Israel received a reply back that it was not in violation of Facebook’s standards. Only after the Israeli NGO had made a video exposing Facebook’s double standard was the page against Israel removed.
Perhaps even more troubling is the suppression of news articles based on Facebook’s algorithm for individual users. This algorithm relies on a number of factors including “silent lurking” on Facebook pages, other websites the user visits, and – disturbingly – text that a user types into Facebook but doesn’t actually post. Recently, Facebook also included 5 new reaction emojis to their like button for U.S. users. As expected, this change will supply even more data to Facebook for its news feed algorithm. Facebook claims it’s using these numerous data points to tailor posts to what individual users want to read. Unfortunately, such a tailored news feeds mean users may not be given the option to read stories that might challenge their belief system, like conservative articles that tend to conflict with the main stream media.
Ironically, one of Facebook’s internal studies, looking at the types of news an ideologically defined user viewed, reflected this. What was discovered was that Facebook’s algorithm suppressed fewer liberal news stories a conservative would see than conservative news stories a liberal would see. Moreover, Facebook’s analysis reflected that conservative users would click on a liberal news story in their news feed almost a third more often than liberals would click on conservative stories in their feeds.
Additionally, Facebook’s study found that liberal users were generally connected to fewer friends who shared conservative stories than conservatives were connected to liberal friends sharing liberal stories. This factor, uninfluenced by Facebook’s biased algorithm, is apparently caused by the fact that liberals block, unfriend, or hide users with posts they disagree with far more frequently than conservatives. Contrary to conventional wisdom, conservatives tend to be more open-minded than liberals – at least on Facebook.
Because liberal Facebook users are more close-minded than conservatives, they report conservative posts as offensive at a more frequent rate, thus suppressing those posts on Facebook. This is yet another factor creating an anti-conservative bias on Facebook.
So what’s the answer Facebook bias? The good news is that YOU have control. NEVER use your Facebook feed as your exclusive news source. Instead, either go directly to the Facebook page you are following, or visit the websites of conservative publishers themselves. Yes, this involves an extra step. But it’s imperative that we stay at least a step ahead of the leftists who are attempting to transform our nation and world.
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