Curators of the social media company’s ‘trending news’ sidebar purposely leave out stories from rightwing sites, a former employee has alleged 
 
 Facebook’s trending bar deliberately suppresses conservative news, according to a new report. 
 
 Facebook, now arguably the most important distributor of news online, has cultivated the idea that its bar is an impartial algorithm that responds to “likes” and gives users only what they’ve indicated they want. 
 
 But in a bombshell confession on the tech blog Gizmodo, a former editor says popular conservative news would be kept off the “trending news” sidebar. 
 
 
 
 “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” the former news curator told Gizmodo. 
 
 
 
 The news started a firestorm in conservative media circles. The Drudge Report ran the piece in its top slot with a picture of Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and the headline: “Not Leaning In ... Leaning Left!” a reference to her bestselling book, Lean In. 
 
 Breitbart News editor in chief Alex Marlow said the report confirmed “what conservatives have long suspected: Facebook’s trending news artificially mutes conservatives and amplifies progressives. 
 
 “Facebook claims its algorithm simply populates ‘topics that have recently become popular on Facebook’ in its trending news section, but now we know that’s not true.” 
 
 Paul Bedard, DC reporter for the Washington Examiner, accused the social media network of “censoring conservatives”. 
 
 
 
 Paul Bedard (@SecretsBedard) Facebook is No. 1 driver of mobile readers to news sites. Impact obvious in censoring conservatives. https://t.co/hWm68stLwa via @DCExaminer 
 
 Hugo Gurdon, the Washington Examiner’s editorial director, said: “We’ve read the report, and it is obviously of considerable interest to us. We plan on working with Facebook to ensure Washington Examiner’s valuable content gets the attention it obviously deserves.” 
 
 Leon Wolf, an author at Redstate, one of the publications listed by the Gizmodo interviewees as having been targeted for exclusion, said he had not seen evidence of the kind of tampering mentioned by Gizmodo. “I watch our Facebook stats very closely,” Wolf told the Guardian. 
 
 “The troubling thing about this is that Facebook is such a huge deal,” Wolf said. “They can make or break success in a way that nobody else can. There’s a lot of scrutiny that people have on CNN, they’re several orders of magnitude less influential than Facebook is.” 
 
 
 
 The rise of Facebook as a dominant player in news has already worried some media watchers who are concerned the social network could become too powerful and set the news agenda and potentially block news that might not fit its corporate agenda. 
 
 Emily Bell, director of the Tow centre for digital journalism at Columbia journalism school, said on Twitter that she questioned whether algorithms could ever be impartial. 
 
 
 
 emily bell (@emilybell) @dominicru @attackerman @ShaunKing as I like to bore my students/the general public with...algorithms are never neutral. Ever. 
 
 But Gizmodo’s report was challenged by one ex-Facebooker who took issue with its characterization in an interview with the Guardian, saying that newsworthiness was determined by how often a story appeared on a list of trusted news outlets including this publication, the New York Times and the BBC. If five of the 10 put a story on the front page, it could be made to appear more often on Facebook Paper; if 10 put the story on the front page, it was added to the “trending” bar. 
 
 
 
 Beyond the list of 10 internationally trusted publications was another list of a thousand news sources that showed the editors where stories were trending; that list was more fungible and could be added to or subtracted from. 
 
 
 
 The former news curator interviewed by the Guardian hadn’t seen evidence that conservative stories were being blacklisted. “I was only there for four or five months, but I didn’t see that happening,” the person said. The employee added, however that the job was to identify pertinent news stories based on a strict set of criteria. “But also whenever we started a shift you’d go through stories that had been greenlit, and you had to prove yourself to be consistent enough to be a competent editor.” 
 
 
 
 The former contractor maintained that the unit had enough power to push back when others in the company asked for a story to be removed. “The one time when we had intervention on a story we did was when Sheryl Sandberg’s husband died,” the ex-employee said. “We reported it as a news story – ‘COO’s husband died in location X.’ A whole bunch of people said, ‘We shouldn’t report on that story,’ and we said, ‘Well, it’s news, so we’re covering it.’ We kept it up and we never got any flack from Sheryl or anyone else.” 
 
 
 
 The feeds, the ex-employee said, were pure popularity among Facebook users, but popularity as determined by human curators: “Beyoncé trends most days, but that’s just because people are posting pictures of Beyoncé.” ||||| Facebook drives over 80 percent of the traffic of mobile readers to news sites, making it the King of News for smart phones and showing how its censorship of conservative media can have a huge and negative impact on them, according to a new survey. 
 
 Pew Research Center said that Facebook towers over Twitter in delivering mobile readers to news sites. 
 
 "Facebook sends by far the most mobile readers to news sites of any social media site," said Pew. 
 
 "Facebook sends the vast majority of social media traffic to these news stories: 82 percent of the social traffic to longer stories and 84 percent of the social traffic to shorter news articles. Twitter, on the other hand, accounts for just 16 percent of referrals to longer articles from social sites and 14 percent for shorter," said the latest Pew research. 
 
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 Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week, and the social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution. “When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news,” he said in a Q&A last year, adding that he wants Facebook Instant Articles to be the “primary news experience people have.” 
 
 Facebook’s stranglehold over the traffic pipe has pushed digital publishers into an uneasy alliance with the $350 billion behemoth, and the news business has been caught up in a jittery debate about what, precisely, the company’s intentions are. Will it swallow the business whole, or does it really just want publishers to put neat things in users’ news feeds? For its part, Facebook—which has recently begun paying publishers including Buzzfeed and the New York Times to post a quota of Facebook Live videos every week—bills its relationship with the media as a mutually beneficial landlord-tenant partnership. 
 
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 But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team—“news curators” as they’re known internally—Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm. 
 
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 Launched in January 2014, Facebook’s trending news section occupies some of the most precious real estate in all of the internet, filling the top-right hand corner of the site with a list of topics people are talking about and links out to different news articles about them. The dozen or so journalists paid to run that section are contractors who work out of the basement of the company’s New York office. 
 
 
 
 “We were housed in a conference room for two-and-a-half months,” said one former curator (all former curators insisted on anonymity out of concerns over violating their non-disclosure agreements with Facebook). “It was clear that Zuckerberg could squash the project at any moment.” 
 
 “It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as individuals. We were treated in this robot way.” 
 
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 This section, no doubt, drives a substantial number of monthly views to news outlets. Facebook wouldn’t specify, but anecdotal evidence suggests that being featured in the trending widget boosts clicks to a story by many thousands. The trending news section is responsible for dictating many of the stories the average person reads when they’re using Facebook. But nobody really knows much about how it works—and the company isn’t telling. 
 
 
 
 “We choose what’s trending,” said one former news curator. 
 
 The trending news section is run by people in their 20s and early 30s, most of whom graduated from Ivy League and private East Coast schools like Columbia University and NYU. They’ve previously worked at outlets like the New York Daily News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and the Guardian. Some former curators have left Facebook for jobs at organizations including the New Yorker, Mashable, and Sky Sports. 
 
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 According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. “We choose what’s trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.” 
 
 News curators aren’t Facebook employees—they’re contractors. One former team member said they received benefits including limited medical insurance, paid time off after 6 months and transit reimbursement, but were otherwise excluded from the culture and perks of working at Facebook. “A company happy hour would happen at 8 p.m., and we’d be working,” said another former curator. “We were apart from a lot of the things happening. But we were employed under very different circumstances.” 
 
 When the curators, hired by companies like BCForward and Pro Unlimited (which are then subcontracted through Accenture to provide workers for Facebook), arrive at work each day, they read through a list of trending topics ranked by Facebook’s algorithm from most popular (or most engaged) to least. The curators then determine the news story the terms are related to. 
 
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 The news curation team writes headlines for each of the topics, along with a three-sentence summary of the news story it’s pegged to, and choose an image or Facebook video to attach to the topic. The news curator also chooses the “most substantive post” to summarize the topic, usually from a news website. The former contractors Gizmodo interviewed said they were asked to write neutral headlines, and encouraged to promote a video only if it had been uploaded to Facebook. They were also told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like the New York Times, Time, Variety, and other traditional outlets. They would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets. They were also discouraged from mentioning Twitter by name in headlines and summaries, and instead asked to refer to social media in a broader context. 
 
 News curators also have the power to “deactivate” (or blacklist) a trending topic—a power that those we spoke to exercised on a daily basis. A topic was often blacklisted if it didn’t have at least three traditional news sources covering it, but otherwise the protocol was murky—meaning a curator could ostensibly blacklist a topic without a particularly good reason for doing so. (Those we interviewed said they didn’t see any signs that blacklisting was being abused or used inappropriately.) 
 
 In early 2015, when Facebook’s trending news project was still in its infancy, there weren’t many rules about how curators did the rest of their job. “It was all pretty easy breezy,” said one. “We were trained on the basics of everything, then we were thrown into the deep end” with some supervision. 
 
 
 
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 Over time, the work became increasingly demanding, and Facebook’s trending news team started to look more and more like the worst stereotypes of a digital media content farm. Managers gave curators aggressive quotas for how many summaries and headlines to write, and timed how long it took curators to write a post. The general standard was 20 posts a day. “We shared documents to see how fast everyone was working,” said one former curator. “They tried to foster inter-office competition to see how many topics we could complete every day.” 
 
 Burnout was rampant. “Most of the original team isn’t there anymore,” said another former news curator. “It was a stop-gap for them. Most of the people were straight out of [journalism school]. At least one of them was fired. Most of them quit or were hired by other news outlets.” 
 
 According to one contractor, a colleague sent around a letter asking if people were unhappy with their working conditions. Managers told contractors not to mention that they worked at Facebook on their resumes or in any public profiles. “I got the sense that they wanted to keep the magic about how trending topics work a secret,” said another former news curator. “We had to write in the most passive tense possible. That’s why you’d see headlines that appear in an alien-esque, passive language.” Despite management’s best efforts, many of the contractors are publicly listed in a simple LinkedIn search. 
 
 
 
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 One reason Facebook might want to keep the trending news operation faceless is that it wants to foster the illusion of a bias-free news ranking process—a network that sorts and selects news stories like an entirely apolitical machine. After all, the company’s entire media division, which is run by Facebook’s managing editor Benjamin Wagner, depends on people’s trust in the platform as a conduit for information. If an editorial team is deliberating over trending topics—just like a newspaper staff would talk about front-page news—Facebook risks losing its image as a non-partisan player in the media industry, a neutral pipeline for distributing content, rather than a selective and inherently flawed curator. 
 
 That said, many former employees suspect that Facebook’s eventual goal is to replace its human curators with a robotic one. The former curators Gizmodo interviewed started to feel like they were training a machine, one that would eventually take their jobs. Managers began referring to a “more streamlined process” in meetings. As one former contractor put it: “We felt like we were part of an experiment that, as the algorithm got better, there was a sense that at some point the humans would be replaced.” 
 
 When asked about the trending news team and its future, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation. As with all contractors, the trending review team contractors are fairly compensated and receive appropriate benefits.” 
 
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 According to those we interviewed, their peers still at Facebook believe their jobs are being phased out. From a group of about 20, Facebook has fired at least eight people this year, and according to former curators, the company has yet to replace any of them. “They had hired us and promised us a job for at least a year,” said one. “Within three months, six of us were fired. No reason was given. We were just told ‘the company is cutting back.’” 
 
 One former contractor thinks that Facebook’s end goal with its trending section is simple: “It’s an experiment,” this person said. “They are just running tests to see what would increase engagement. At the end of the day, engagement was the only thing they wanted.” 
 
 The data Facebook is gleaning from upwards of 1 billion users clicking through the trending news module could have a significant impact on the future of news—what we read, how, and from which sources. A future that, if it’s not being determined by a group of 20-something contractors in a basement, will be determined in part by the algorithm that group trained. “They have it down to a science,” said one former curator. “We were truly slaves to the algorithm.”
– A former curator of Facebook's "trending news" feature says employees often deliberately kept conservative news out of the spotlight, reports Gizmodo. “Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” says the anonymous ex-employee. For example, stories about the IRS' Lois Lerner scandal, CPAC, or topics from the Drudge Report or other conservative outlets wouldn't make the cut, even if they were clearly popular online. As a previous Gizmodo story explained, Facebook has a team of young journalists who provide human oversight to the company's news algorithm and help select which headlines qualify as "trending" in the upper right corner of Facebook pages. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the ex-employee says. The Guardian calls it a "bombshell confession," one that has set off a flurry of interest on the right. Drudge, for example, gave the story prominent play alongside a photo of Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg with the headline, "Not Leaning In ... Leaning Left!” And the conservative Washington Examiner, calling Facebook the "King of News" for smartphones, says the practice could have a "huge and negative impact" on conservative media.