Facebook is used by a lot of people every single day so to have a story appear in its Trending Topics list can bring a website a considerable amount of traffic. A new report published today claims that the world’s largest social network routinely omitted news stories trending among political conservatives from the trending list. The revelation comes from former contractors who worked as curators for Facebook’s Trending Topics.
One former curator told Gizmodo that when they would log on they would see the topics popular with conservatives were not on the list. The contractor said that either the person running the list did not recognize the news topic or was biased against a conservative figure involved.
The same person said that Lois Lerner, an IRS official under fire from Republicans for apparently targeting conservative groups, and former presidential hopeful Gov. Scott Walker were among the topics that were omitted from the list. Another former curator told the scribe that if a story being considered for inclusion was found on a conservative news website the curators would try to look for the same story on a neutral news outlet.
Some curators even said that people who were listing content in the Trending feed could even insert a topic in the feed even if it wasn’t among the most discussed topics on the social network. Gizmodo has not been able to determine if curators working for Facebook took similar steps for stories from liberal news outlets.
Facebook has not yet commented on this report.
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