In many ways, the evolution of Facebook mirrors the maturing process of its audience. This change was followed by the ability to post pictures (and later video), the creation of apps and games, groups and then pages, companies, messenger services, money transfer and so on. This changed the site from one you used occasionally to find someone, to one that contained all the latest information about your social circle, and thus needed to be checked regularly, and is the thing that made Facebook the most successful social media site by far. From here, the site evolved to allow people to see a timeline of their friends’ activities, the “news feed”, which changed the system from a directory to a regular source of information. In other words, it was like a dating site. All members of the site were searchable, and connections could be easily made. Status updates were limited to words, and were not preserved in a timeline or “feed”. This section was the only section that allowed pictures, and it originally allowed you to say whether you were looking for friendship, relationships, or something else. In its initial iteration, Facebook’s focus was on the profile, and the information contained within. It’s probably not that simple, but the basic impetus is true – Facebook was founded as a means to foster social connections, initially within a university campus, and then across the Internet. It’s the classic story, boy meets girl, boy loses girl (actually girl dumps boy, but let’s not get into issues of women’s agency in popular culture representations here), boy invents new technology to get revenge on girl and find new girl. If Hollywood is to be believed, Facebook was founded by a guy who wanted to get girls. This is about Facebook, and how it is becoming the “newspaper of record” for the world, and how disturbing a thought that is. This is not another piece about how the news industry is under threat, how social media is stealing its audience and advertisers (although all of those things are true). We know this, we have known it for some time. It's not clear if anything has changed at Facebook since these staffers last worked at Facebook.Paper for Rhodes Journalism Review, May 2016.įacebook is changing news. The former staff members who informed this story were employed at Facebook between mid-2014 and December 2015. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool," said one former staffer. It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. "When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it. Notably, former employees also said that news about Facebook wouldn't show up in the Trending section.
It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is," said one former employee. It's important to note that this suppression wasn't a measure of a command from on-high handed down by management, but rather the discretion of the human beings working on the Trending section.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz is a notable conservative.Ī variety of suppressed topics and outlets were noted - everything from Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to conservative news aggregation site The Drudge Report. "I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news."
"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," one former staffer told Gizmodo. And according to a new report at Gizmodo based on interviews with several former staff members of Facebook's Trending editorial team, there's an anti-Conservative bias inherent in what's chosen for representation in the Trending area. These humans may also determine where that news comes from - as in, which outlets you're seeing news from. These humans tend to be of the journalist variety, and their job isn't much different than, well, my job: to determine what readers care about, and to prioritize that stuff. But there are also humans behind what may or may not populate in your Trending area. The topics you see are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you've liked and your location.Īnd how does that stuff get determined? By math! Well, algorithms, more accurately. Trending shows you topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.
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