Widely-used social media site Facebook has been accused of bias concerning which news stories the site prioritizes.
Charisma News cites a 2014 Pew Research Center poll that revealed 61 percent of millennials, 51 percent of Generation X-ers, and 39 Percent of Baby Boomers “got news about politics and government in the previous week” from Facebook.
Facebook also tailors news stories to each user, based on location, pages that user has liked, and things the user has posted.
With so many people using Facebook as a main news source, allegations of news bias is troubling.
“Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's influential "trending" news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site's users,” reported the website Gizmodo.
Facebook employees denied these allegation, stating that they “take allegations of bias very seriously” and that Facebook is “a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum.”
Charisma News cites instances of the liberal left tweaking news stories to be more favorable to their point of view. The insinuation is that, if the left bends the facts or censors conservative views in other news spaces, they may be doing so on Facebook as well.
Publication date: May 11, 2016
