An editor from the technology news site Gizmodo discussed the website’s exclusive article about how Facebook suppressed conservative-leaning news stories in its trending section in a Tuesday interview with CBS This Morning.
The story prompted backlash from conservative and liberal critics, followed by a strong denial from the social media giant.
Gizmodo technology editor Michael Nunez, who authored the article, explained that he began reporting on Facebook after a leaked document from a Facebook employee was sent to Gizmodo unsolicited. The document revealed that some workers in Facebook’s Menlo Park, California office scratched out "black lives matter" on the company’s famous signature wall to write "all lives matter" in its place. Gizmodo published an article about this private memo in February.
"When we published that story, it emboldened some Facebook employees to step forward and say, ‘Well, you think that’s good, we’ve got more information,’" Nunez described. "And every time that we’ve published a story in the past two months, more and more employees have come forward with more revealing information."
Nunez said that his latest article provides evidence that Facebook is "misleading the public about its trending news column."
While Facebook claims "that an algorithm is sorting what people are able to see," Nunez said, "what we found is that a select group of about 20 journalists, young twenty-somethings, often Ivy League-educated or from private East Coast schools, are the ones that are sorting through the news feed and determining what people are able to see and more importantly what they are not able to see."
Nunez said these editors displayed a "selection bias," in part because they were not veteran journalists from prominent news organizations, but were essentially contractors who did not receive the same pay and benefits as regular Facebook employees.
CBS host Norah O’Donnell pointed out that there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was aware of any political bias. She asked Nunez if he thought the bias was the work of Facebook employees acting on their own.
"I don’t think it was rogue employees; I would call it an institutional failure," Nunez responded. "You showed a quote earlier about neutrality. Well, the fact is that they have set up a system that allows for human bias to impact what people are able to see in their feeds."
In a response to Gizmodo’s story, Facebook said it "does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we’ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible."
"They can say that as much as they want, but the fact is we have evidence of them blacklisting in a lot of cases conservative news," Nunez responded.
Nunez described how Facebook did not allow the Conservative Political Action Committee’s annual conference to appear in the company’s trending news feed.
"Every single topic that is shown in the trending news feed needs to be activated by one of these curators," he said. "So they say, ‘Yes, this is okay. This is a news event, and we’ll allow it to trend.’ When they do that, they write a summary of the news event, a headline, and find some corresponding stories.
"The problem is that there is such an emphasis on numbers among these curators that they often choose easier stories like Kim Kardashian posting an Instagram photo," Nunez continued. "That’s a lot easier to summarize than something as nuanced as Ferguson protests or ... something that’s not one-dimensional."
Nunez said he does not believe there was an intentional bias at play, but that a system was put in place that allowed individuals to "inflate news using something called an injection tool to force news into the trending topics and also suppress news ... That calls into question the legitimacy of the trending topics entirely. These aren’t exactly trending topics. They’re being selected by an editorial board."
Stories about former IRS official Lois Lerner, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R.), The Drudge Report, and Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL killed in 2013, were suppressed by Facebook, according to Gizmodo.
"I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news," a former curator at Facebook told Gizmodo.
Tom Stocky, a vice president at Facebook, said in an official response that the company has "in place strict guidelines for our trending topic reviewers as they audit topics surfaced algorithmically: reviewers are required to accept topics that reflect real world events, and are instructed to disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources."
Nunez said the implications of his story are great.
"There’s nothing wrong with Facebook having an editorial board and choosing what the topics are, but they have to be transparent about it," Nunez said. "You can’t call that a trending news section if these topics aren’t legitimately trending in the first place. We found evidence of them populating the algorithm with topics that weren’t trending on Facebook at all. Those are called external topics. In several instances we found them manufacturing trends."
Nunez said he repeatedly emailed employees at Facebook giving them opportunities to respond to his story. He never received a reply.