After a year of Facebook scandals for bias in its trending “News Feed” against conservatives, CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now being attacked by the Left for allowing negative stories to appear that supposedly cost Democrat Hillary Clinton the presidency.
The Left is spitting mad that Donald Trump won the presidency. Rather than accept the vote of the people, progressives are lashing out at Facebook for not doing enough to stop the proliferation of what they call “fake news” about Hillary Clinton regarding Benghazi, handling of emails and the probability of her being indicted by the FBI.
Lashing out against Facebook got so intense that Zuckerberg in his keynote speech for Techonomy16 that opened the day after the election, responded that Facebook is always trying to improve the quality of the News Feed experience. But he also stated:
“Personally, I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, of which it’s a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way is a pretty crazy idea.”
Facebook has triumphed in casting its trending News Feed as the main-stream-media for the 21st Century. According to the Pew Research Center, 66 percent of Facebook’s 156.5 million U.S. users now get the majority of their daily news from the site.
The company suffered a major scandal in May, when a former journalist at News Feed, told the Gizmodo web site that he and other Facebook staff members routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news feed section.
The confidential informant specifically pointed to Facebook prevented “organically trending” posting on its highly-influential News Feed section from conservative users about Mitt Romney and Rand Paul and the huge 2016 Conservative Political Action Conference that attracted 30,000 attendees.
After first denying any knowledge of bias, Zuckerberg was forced to admit some former Facebook employees that curated content “might” have been biased against conservatives. He promised to retrain employees and impose new “controls and oversight” to cut bias. He also agreed to stop allowing the liberal New York Times, CNN, NBC News, Washington Post and BuzzFeed to dominate Facebook New Feed postings.
But the revelations kicked off a Senate inquiry of Zuckerberg from Republican John Thune, Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. To avoid an official investigation into News Feed continuing bias, Facebook launched an internal investigation. After determining there had been “unintentional biases” by its overwhelmingly progressive workforce, Zuckerberg took the extraordinary step of firing all News Feed curators in July.
But it now seems that the Left’s post-election ruckus against Facebook is retaliation for Zuckerberg eliminating the biased progressive curators.
Zuckerberg told several thousand Techonomy16 attendees and thousands streaming the conference worldwide that a lot of confusion about the election comes from Hillary Clinton supporters adopting a narrative that implicitly assumed Trump supporters are dumb. He added, “The media remains steadfast in ignoring that Trump supporters ultimately believed their candidate can bring them a better life.”
Rather than placing blame on the accessibility of facts, Zuckerberg noted that Trump’s posts on Facebook got more engagement than Clinton’s. In closing his remarks, Zuckerberg stated, “People are smart and they understand what’s important to them.”