Last month, a bit of a bombshell was dropped when a Gizmodo article came out featuring an interview with a former Facebook employee who spilled the beans on the site’s “trending news” section. His confession? The trending section is strongly curated by employees, whose entire job is to choose what will and won’t be displayed. Furthermore, this person confessed that he had been instructed to heavily censor conservative news on the trending news section of Facebook, and so had other employees.
How deep does this leftism in Facebook run exactly? They wouldn’t hide a terror attack because it’s inconvenient to the leftist agenda, would they? Take a look at my trending section on Facebook today, and you might have your answer.
On the day of writing this, June 28th, 2016, there was a terrible terror attack in Turkey, where close to 40 people were killed by terrorists who blew themselves up with homemade explosives. You would think that an international terror threat would be the top story of Facebook’s trending news, right? After all, the day of the Orlando shooting it was on there all day. I logged onto Facebook three different times from 4:00pm to 11:00pm, and want to know how many times I saw the story? Zero.
4:00pm
I love how there is a story here about a 6 year old boy playing with a gun that shot his brother, but not that 36 people died from yet another radical Islamic terrorist attack. Liberally biased Facebook is helping to play up the gun control narrative, plugging this story into my “trending news” section instead of the terrorist attack because most of the deaths were caused by explosives, and because there is so such thing as radical Islam. Had today been another gun-exclusive terror attack, it would have been the #1 story all day.
8:00pm
I check a few hours later, and it’s still not there! But look, Mark Zuckerberg’s neighbors are mad at him for building a wall! What a story! Meanwhile, we are angry at Zuckerberg for having such a blatantly biased staff who can’t provide it’s millions of users with a truthful look at the world we live in.
11:00pm
Another story about Chipotle’s new rewards program, but still no sign of the terror attacks. At this point I give up, and it sinks in just how biased this “trending” feature of theirs really is. These are going to be huge talking points during our presidential election, don’t you think people should be up to speed on what their candidate is actually talking about?
Since the Gizmodo article revealed just how biased this “trending” section is, Facebook’s Chef Operating Partner Sheryl Sandberg actually met with conservatives in Washington to discuss the matter. She agreed that the bias was happening, and vowed to include a political diversity training seminar for her staff going forward to prevent liberal bias. I’d like to say that this is a case of indoctrinated college grads who don’t know any better because they were brainwashed by their liberal professors, but it seems to run a lot deeper than that.
In conclusion, you aren’t crazy for thinking that Facebook’s “trending news” has a political agenda, because they absolutely do. Facebook, if you’re reading this, I have a word of advice for you- when there is a brutal terrorist attack that claims the lives of close to 40 people, please keep it pinned at the top of your trending section. People deserve to know what’s going on in the world.
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