(Clinton.news) A couple of incidents that have been exposed over the past couple of weeks prove once and for all that you simply cannot trust the “mainstream” media and information streams that you’re being fed when it comes to truth and accuracy in political reporting this presidential election.
Not that you ever really could. But this year, the tech giants that control much, if not most, information and news flow over social media are so in the tank for likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton that they have adjusted their algorithms and software to ensure that she gets as little negative publicity as possible.
First, shenanigans at Facebook. As we reported last month, several of the social media giant’s “news curators” – the people in charge of finding popular news stories, writing summaries of them with links and adding them to the “Trending” section on your Facebook page – have been outed as intentionally disregarding news stories about conservative political figures and topics, even if they were actually trending. In many cases, say former news curators who watched it happen time and again, news stories that were added to the “Trending” section weren’t actually trending at all, though favorable topics involving conservative news sources were trending.
As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, Tom Stocky, Facebook’s vice president of product management, issued a response to the allegations first published by Gizmodo that thus far he has not found any evidence to show that the allegations are true – as though he’d rush right out and admit it in the first place.
“Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality,” Stocky – a donor to Clinton’s campaign - continued. “These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.”
News curators who left in disgust told Gizmodo something completely different:
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that 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 [originally] trending among the site’s users.
It can only be one way: Either the people who spoke to Gizmodo are lying – or Facebook’s Stocky, Clinton's donor, is lying. You decide.
Next, Google. As also reported by the Free Beacon, search results on the world’s largest search engine (and media company) are being kind to Clinton as well:
“Crime” and “indictment” are not the only terms Google is keeping hidden from searches of Hillary Clinton, a Washington Free Beacon analysis finds.
Common search terms associated with Clinton appear to have been scrubbed from Google as the tech giant has been accused of manipulating its autocomplete results to favor the Democratic presidential candidate.
“While researching for a wrap-up on the June 7 Presidential Primaries, we discovered evidence that Google may be manipulating autocomplete recommendations in favor of Hillary Clinton,” Matt Lieberman of SourceFed wrote. “If true, this would mean that Google Searches aren’t objectively reflecting what the majority of Internet searches are actually looking for, possibly violating Google’s algorithm.”
He has released a video of his research, here.
So there you have it. These are just a couple of examples from the past few weeks; as the campaign season ahead, expect more of this kind of chicanery. In the meantime, there are certainly other places to get honest news regarding Clinton (this site is a great place), Trump (go here) and campaign news in general (here).
As clever as these tech giants think they’re being, one way to look at their deception is that they obviously don’t believe their candidate can stand up to fair scrutiny, otherwise they wouldn’t be altering their coverage of her. That says even they don’t have enough faith in her ability stand on her own and actually earn the office she seeks, which says as much about the kind of people they are as it does her.
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