WSJ Reports That Facebook Employees Tried to Suppress Conservative Content

Mandel Ngan/Pool via AP

There’s a new report out about Facebook bias, and it’s not a good one for conservative outlets.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Facebook employees have consistently tried to suppress or de-platform outlets on the right, despite objections by managers who don’t want the political fallout. The WSJ allegedly saw internal discussions on a message board that the employees used.

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According to the report, Breitbart News was a particular target that the employees wanted to remove from the News Tab function, claiming that it had drops in trust. But a senior researcher responded that if they judged outlets on that basis, they’d have to take down big news media outlets as well. “I can also tell you that we saw drops in trust in CNN 2 years ago: would we take the same approach for them too?” the researcher wrote.

The report said that after the fact-checking system came in, with things being adjudged false by third-party fact-checkers, which would then earn “strikes,” there was more action against conservative outlets.

This has been a concern of outlets on the right for some time about the new moves and the “strikes.” So, this adds fire to those concerns, if there were employees actually acting this way behind the scenes.

New scoops are reportedly coming this week with more bombshell information.

From NY Post:

Nick Clegg, the vice president of global affairs for Facebook, told workers that “we need to steel ourselves for more bad headlines in the coming days, I’m afraid,” in a Saturday memo obtained by Axios.

The new scoops were expected to come Monday from a number of news outlets that were given leaked material by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen but an embargo on the information​ collapsed Friday and more devastating reporting on the company’s internal workings could be released any time.

The story that broke the embargo on Friday involved a new whistleblower who told the Securities and Exchange Commission that Facebook routinely dismissed concerns about hate speech and the spread of misinformation over fears it would hinder the company’s growth.

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We’ve written before on concerns about the possible ulterior motives with France Haugen.

Meanwhile, Texas passed a law to prohibit Facebook, Twitter and Google from removing conservative viewpoints, and they were sued in response by the companies. Now a federal district court has ruled allowing Texas to get limited discovery from the companies on how they moderate content. That means that they could see, effectively, how they are making those judgements and for what reason they are suppressing to censor people/groups.

Things could get very interesting with what that reveals.

But Democrats want Facebook to crack down still more, as Democratic operative Ben Rhodes reveals.

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They figure the more they scream, like he does there, the more Facebook will be forced to comply with what they want to control on content.

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