Facebook Employees Successfully Pushed To Suppress Conservative Outlets, According To New WSJ Report

By Keneci Channel

In new Wall Street Journal report, internal debates captured in message-board conversations show that the tech giant is systematically biased against conservative and right-leaning content.

The social media giant keeps track of “strikes” for content deemed false by third-party fact-checkers. Repeat offenders could be suspended from posting. But escalations came more frequently against conservative outlets, according to the report.

Facebook introduced two censorship tools after the 2016 election which if removed, according to WSJ report, would increase traffic to Breitbart News by 20 percent, the Washington Times by 18 percent, Western Journal by 16 percent, and the Epoch Times by 11 percent.

The tech giant introduced “Sparing Sharing” and “Informed Engagement” as part of an effort to curb so-called misinformation. The first tool reduced the spread of posts shared by Facebook’s most engaged users, aka “hyperposters.” The second reduced the spread of content shared without reading it. The company eventually removed the second tool, but kept Sparing Sharing, which continued to censor the site’s most engaged users.

Far-left employees of Facebook have also targeted conservative outlets like Breitbart News which they pushed to be removed from the News Tab function, especially during the protests following George Floyd’s death by Minneapolis police last year. After a staffer asked on the message-board about removing Breitbart, a senior researcher responded, “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 News Tab feature distributes news stories to users from a curated list of websites almost all left-wing outlets.

Facebook is basically throttling the traffic of conservative news outlets like Breitbart on the platform, while directly paying left-wing outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times for content.

This is contrary to what the Big Tech giant told United States Congress at a hearing. Mark Zuckerberg told congress that broad changes to Facebook’s policies and technology are not designed to censor conservatives.

One slide provided by WSJ show that the social media giant puts far-left outlets in the so-called top "trusted" quadrant. Outlets in this quadrant include CNN, NBC, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. These are outlets that have pushed the discredited Russiagate and Ukrainegate hoaxes throughout the presidency of Donald Trump.

The WSJ report shows that Facebook's far-left employees in the “racial justice” group suggest all sorts of censorship measures to target conservative content, especially during busy news events that paint Democrats as incompetent, unhinged and pro-crime, like the George Floyd protests which was heavily covered by conservative news outlets while left-wing outlets like CNN downplayed the violent riots.

Mark Zuckerberg admitted during a 2018 hearing in Congress, that Silicon Valley, where his company is based, is an “extremely left leaning place.” The San Francisco bay area regularly tops lists of the most liberal cities in America, and over 75 percent of donations from Facebook employees went to Democrats in the last cycle.

It is clear that despite efforts by the social media giant to censor content from conservative sources, data from Facebook-owned social media analytics company Crowdtangle shows that content from right-leaning sources like Breitbart News are wildly more popular with the platform's users, and generates more engagement than far-left sources like The New York Times and Washington Post.

More reports are 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. The story that broke the embargo involved a new whistleblower, apparently a left-wing employee 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.

Ironically as conservative author and The Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway revealed in her book -- Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections -- Mark Zuckerberg played arguably a pivotal role in the election of Democrat president Joe Biden.