• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 10, 2016

Facebook is denying claims that it has an anti-conservative bias in its trending news postings, as alleged yesterday by Gizmodo in a story citing anonymous former Facebook employees.  

The former employees, who worked as “news curators,” told Gizmodo that they were ordered to suppress news of interest to conservative readers by removing it from the trending news feed. According to the same report, the curators removed conservative news despite its popularity as reflected in organic growth.

The employees claimed that the unwritten rule against conservative news was promulgated by the team of young professional journalists (predictably Ivy League-educated liberal types) hired by Facebook to “curate” the trending news feed.

Gizmodo quoted one former employee: “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC 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.”

On Tuesday Facebook vice president for search Tom Stocky responded to the allegations in a post on the Facebook blog: “Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.”

Nonetheless, these rules would not necessarily preclude a group of managers with an ideological (or other) agenda from enacting an embargo on “unacceptable” news content by general, possibly unspoken agreement. Sadly, many conservatives of my acquaintance take it for granted that not only mainstream media but also the management of all the Silicon Valley tech giants are indisputably liberal and unafraid to extend that bias to their marketing and products, including news and information.