Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

We tend to rally against centralization and attempts to control information. Which is exactly why this is frontpage on HN.

FB has been consistently attacked for this type of stuff for years. That's a healthy sign of our community valuing freedom/markets/algorithms over the risks of handing over large amounts of power to a few humans. It seems even Facebook even values this approach as their own technology reaches parity with human curation:

> Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected.

Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder.

What scandals were being discussed yet suppressed from the "trending news" list out of these examples? How many of these examples are actual news stories? The IRS thing turned out to be overblown bullshit, what about the rest of them?

When was the last time you heard your friends talking about Scott Walker, the guy who flopped in the polls and dropped out of the race before a single primary?

It shouldn't be surprising if these curators decided to wait to see if a story being shared from breitbart.com was reported by bigger news outlets first. Many of these so-called conservative media outlets have a terrible record on reporting actual news.

It is possible that Facebook suppresses actual news. It is also possible that this source (falsely) believed that not-really-news-or-trending stories were "suppressed" when in fact they were just not popular or smelt like bullshit.

I'm sure at the time, the Church were confident they were right about the matter and therefore had no qualms in suppressing Galileo's claims.

Freedom of information and opinion is what drives progress. Should conservative opinions be wrong, then there is no fear in giving them a platform - they can be publicly debunked, to the downfall of their message.

Given that they are feared, suggests that the jury is still out on whether their opinions are categorically wrong, or even whether the opposing opinion is categorically right. In this case, it will be free discussion which will enable us as a society to converge on the correct path.

In fact, it directly supports the scenario the OP brought up. Frequently Bernie Sanders will bring something up and then the media focuses its article on Hillary's response (even if that article might sometimes be unflattering).

From the story:

> Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

That doesn't seem too terrible to me. If something from a untrustworthy source known for political agitprop is trending, I wouldn't mind Facebook waiting to see if the mainstream press picks up on it.

If they were letting through stories from places like AlterNet through that would show bias, but being generally cautious with biased sites that have low journalistic standards isn't the worst thing in the world.