LONDON (Bywire News) - Ever wondered why your Facebook feed is full of right-wing conspiracy theories? As so often the answer is: blame Mark Zuckerberg. According to recent a Wall Street Journal report, Facebook has been throttling off traffic to left-wing websites and the orders come right from the top.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal in 2017, Facebook made changes that reduced the visibility of prominent left-wing sites. The plan was approved by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and came in response to concerns among Facebook executives that upcoming changes to the algorithm might unfairly impact right-wing sites.
The algorithm was intended to make the platform less spammy and a crackdown on sensationalist posts that spread misinformation. They built up a database of ads and sites which linked to low-quality web pages with little content or contained shocking and misleading information.
In other words, it was intended to make Facebook more honest, transparent and truthful while making it more difficult to spread disinformation, racism and hate. Unfortunately, these are just the features that fuel right wing websites.
This, felt some within Facebook, represented an unfair advantage to left-wing websites which were much less likely to contain falsehoods or abusive content.
The new tweaks had a substantive impact on left-wing sites such as Mother Jones, a non-profit organisation set up to shine a light on corruption. In 2019 they wrote that the site had seen a sharp decline in its audience from Facebook which equated to a loss of approximately $600,000. This made it difficult to pursue certain projects or fill some positions.
For example, it was they who, in 2012, broke the news about Mitt Romney’s 47% remarks in which he said:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
Facebook has so far not responded to the claims.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)