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(Freedom.news) In recent days, you may have read that Facebook news curators – those guys and gals who identify and summarize popular news items, providing links to stories in the “Trending” section of your feed – were ignoring real trending stories from conservative media. For days afterward this finding seemed to stun a lot of people – conservative people, mostly – who were appalled that Facebook would actually do something like this.
If you were one of these people, the question for you is, simply, why? Why were you surprised?
Zuckerberg – like the founders and current executives of Google, Yahoo, Twitter and just about every other social media platform and major news startup – is run by left wing ideologues who don’t like conservatives, have never liked them, and never will like them. So when we discover that the people who are hired by these sites are doing something that diminishes or denigrates conservative media and conservative organizations, that should not surprise us. The Left is anything but secretive in its disdain for anyone who doesn’t toe the liberal line. That is nothing new.
To that point, Facebook announced last week that it had completed an internal investigation and, of course, found nothing out of the ordinary – no intentional misrepresentation of left-leaning media and no intentional downplaying or ignoring of conservative media.
“Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature. In fact, our analysis indicated that the rates of approval of conservative and liberal topics are virtually identical in Trending Topics,” Colin Stretch, the company’s general counsel, said in an extensive reply to Sen. John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, who is probing the allegations of bias.
This means one of two things: The former news curators who told stories of bias and gave detailed examples to Gizmodo of that bias are lying – or Facebook is lying. Given the Left-leaning nature of Facebook’s founder, who do you believe?
Then there is the fact that an actual Senate committee is looking into this, as if the federal government ought to have some role in what social media and news sites “curate” or post. What would Thune & Co. have done if Facebook owned up to its bias and said, basically, “Yeah, we did it…so what?”
Here’s the point: Anyone who is being honest, politically, knows what side of any given issue Facebook’s founder and his executives favor, so it should not surprise anyone when they actually pick that side of issues. As a consumer/user of Facebook who may disagree with what is happening, you have two options: Leave Facebook or just accept the fact that the stuff you’re going to see in the “Trending” section is biased against your core political beliefs. A third option is to start up a conservative version of Facebook and compete.
But to feign outrage that – gads! – Facebook is liberal is a waste of time.
As for the Senate Commerce Committee, you all need to find something productive to do with your time. Internet content regulation, which seems to be what you’re flirting with, is none of your business because, well, that First Amendment thing.
Water is wet. The sky is blue. Trees are green. And Facebook is run by a bunch of libs. Got it. Let’s move on to something much more important that we can actually fix.
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