The trending news section of Facebook Inc FB has sometimes pushed stories that weren't trending at all, a report on Gizmodo reported. "Workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers," the report read. "Several former curators described using something called an 'injection tool' to push topics into the trending module that weren't organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion – putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own."
What's Going On?
Citing a former journalist who worked on the project, the report said, "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."
Another startling revelation of the report is several former Facebook "news curators," were told to artificially "inject" selected stories into the trending news section, even if they weren't trending.
"I'd come on shift and I'd discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn't be trending because either the curator didn't recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz," the report said citing a former news curator.
The reported findings are in stark violation of Facebook's claim that "trending shows you topics that have recently become popular on Facebook" and "the topics you see are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you've liked and your location."
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