Facebook Can Censor the News You See - Take These Steps to Prevent It from Happening to You

Following Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent hearing before Congress, many have worried that Facebook is censoring the news they see on the social media platform. The social media “Masters of the Universe” are — but here is how to stop it.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives in Washington yesterday where he admitted that Facebook does alter its algorithm to shut down certain types of speech. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) questioned Zuckerberg saying; “We’ve done one hearing on the algorithms, I chair a communications and technology subcommittee here, we’re getting ready to do a second one on algorithms. We’re going to do one next week on prioritization so I’d like to ask you, do you subjectively manipulate your algorithms to prioritize or censor speech?”

Mark Zuckerberg replied; “Congresswoman, we don’t think what we are doing is censoring speech, I think there are types of content like terrorism which I think we all agree we don’t want to have on our service, so we build a system that can identify those and can remove that content and we’re very proud of that work.” Blackburn took Zuckerberg to task saying; “let me tell you something right now, ‘Diamond and Silk’ is not terrorism.”

This made many Facebook users question if the social media platform is purposefully hiding content on their newsfeed — it is. Facebook has recently begun ranking “trusted sources” of news, Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post; “Today I’m sharing our second major update this year: to make sure the news you see, while less overall, is high quality. I’ve asked our product teams to make sure we prioritize news that is trustworthy, informative, and local. And we’re starting next week with trusted sources.” Regardless of Zuckerberg’s messaging, establishment media and far-left outlets have seen a huge boost on Facebook’s platform while independent publishers have dropped.

So how can readers ensure they still see the news that they want to see in their newsfeed? The quick guide below will ensure that posts from the Breitbart News Facebook page still appear in your newsfeed:

Click the drop-down arrow on the toolbar near the notification button at the top of the page:

Click on “News Feed Preferences:”

This will display a preferences page, select “Prioritize who to see first:”

Once you’ve clicked that, select “pages only” from the grey box in the top left and select your favorite publishers and news outlets:

That’s all you need to do to ensure that you see our content first in your newsfeed, similarly sharing our content on a regular basis will help to display it within your friend’s newsfeeds. This is one of the most effective ways that our readers can help Breitbart News fight back against Facebook’s biased News Feed algorithm.