Facebook has more influence over Americans than any other media

By Ajay Kadkol - 17 May '16 10:31AM
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It's pretty obvious that Americans are the most present nationals on Facebook. Facebook if used on desktops/notebooks pretty much shoves up the entire trending topic tab on the right side of the browser.

While the title gives the impression that the list is automated a new report last week announced that a group of 20-something journalists are helping with algorithms where they choose what content appears in the Trending topic tab and write headlines and brief summaries for them which means Facebook have provided complete control to those journalists.

 And on Monday, a former member of the same team alleged that the trending topics team was deliberately skewing the results to favor liberal viewpoints. According to a verified and trusted source Facebook's trending topics team favored stories that were direct from news outlets such as mainstream news organizations like the New York Times or the BBC, Wall Street Journal, CNN which covered them.

"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 former Facebook contractor, who identified himself as a conservative also told "It is beyond disturbing to learn that this power is being used to silence viewpoints and stories that don't fit someone else's agenda". Facebook denied it outright stating that the allegations are untrue. "There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality," wrote Facebook's Tom Stocky late on Monday.The company's power is unknown and the same power is not always deployed in ways that are transparent and accountable.Mark Zuckerberg has always said he wanted to build Facebook into "a utility" and he's only arguably succeeded.

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