Most conservatives have long-believed that Silicon Valley elites are egregiously liberal. These beliefs are now justified thanks to the admission of former Facebook employees that the social media giant intentionally buried conservative news stories.
Facebook’s blatant attempt to shape public opinion became known after this information was disclosed to the tech blog Gizmodo last year. Recently, a ProPublica report suggests the platform is still pursuing this effort by “protecting white men” from radical views.
Facebook Wants You to be a Liberal
Take a look at the small box in the upper right corner of Facebook the next time you log in. It shows a list of popular news topics currently being discussed on the popular social media platform. These topics are partially tailored to each individual Facebook user based on interests, past behavior, social network connections and other factors.
One would think Facebook would allow this list of news stories to be populated according to the stories with the most buzz. Yet the social media platform’s executives actively encouraged trending topics curators to remove conservative stories from this section of the website.
Facebook’s Massive Reach
It is important for Facebook to be politically neutral, as one-sixth of the planet’s residents use the social media platform every single day. Facebook is a powerful news provider that can shape opinions and influence the masses simply based on the news stories it highlights.
The company is supposed to use an algorithm to shed light on the most popular news topics, regardless of their content. Unfortunately, the liberals who run Facebook forced staffers to curate lists of news stories to favor those with liberal slants. Conservative news stories were buried toward the bottom of these lists or completely removed.
This means one-sixth of the world’s population has been consuming news with a strong liberal bias since the platform began integrating news on its platform.
The Smoking Gun
Last year, numerous former Facebook curators told Gizmodo that conservative news content was removed from the automated list of trending topics for two distinct reasons.
The first was that if the story was sourced from a conservative website, the curators were to push the masses toward a more mainstream media site in order to prevent them from delving too deeply into the plethora of far-right opinions. Curators were also encouraged to remove stories if they did not recognize them as important.
Former Facebook curators also report they would add stories to the trending topics lists even if they were not being widely discussed by the platform’s users. They were instructed to do so as Facebook power brokers determined it was important to make the social network appear to be a space where people engaged in discussion about “hard news”. A former curator admits that
Facebook higher-ups decided to inject Black Lives Matter stories into the trending topics list after being criticized for not previously including the activist group’s updates in the feed. There is little doubt Facebook’s brass would reject a similar request made by a conservative group.
Remember: Facebook Claims to be Neutral
Facebook public relations specialists claim the company is “neutral” in the context of politics. The company’s representatives state they would never interfere with voter’s choices and influence who people vote for. These statements are nothing but bald-faced lies.
Former Facebook employees once reported that some coworkers used company meetings as a platform to ask Mark Zuckerberg if the social media giant had a responsibility to block Donald Trump’s candidacy for president of the United States.
It is crystal clear that Facebook’s executives and much of the company’s staff are liberals who do not hesitate to push public opinion as far to the left of the political spectrum as possible. This is an especially troubling fact considering the company’s enormous user base and rapid growth rate.
Facebook’s influence over the masses will continue to grow as we rapidly hurtle into a future dominated by tech and social media. Because of this, conservative users should demand the platform to treat them more fairly, or create a platform that does.
~ Conservative Zone
