Next week, Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg will appear before two congressional committees to discuss revelations that Facebook has lost control of the data of millions (or even billions) of users. But there's another scandal going on at Facebook: Conservative speech is being systematically targeted and censored.
It's been happening over many months. Earlier this year, Facebook announced a major change to its algorithm that took conservative posts out of your news feed. Zuckerberg said the change was made to promote "news that is trustworthy, informative, and local."
For many years now, conservative sites have been noting the negative impact of Facebook's algorithm changes, as their pages and posts "coincidentally" reach a smaller and smaller audience. Facebook also allows less and less traffic to move from Facebook to conservative homepages.
Recent evidence of this is revealed by what Facebook did to Breitbart, one of the largest conservative sites in the nation. Facebook is now tagging every post that links to a Breitbart story with an "about this article" info bubble that calls Breitbart a "far-right" website, and then says: "The site has published a number of falsehoods and conspiracy theories, as well as intentionally misleading stories. Its journalists are ideologically driven, and some of its content has been called misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist..."
As an aside, it makes me laugh that Breitbart is called misogynistic by Facebook while it completely ignored Hillary Clinton's recent comments in India where she actually said American women who voted for Trump did so because their husbands and male bosses coerced them into doing so. If that isn't hating on women, I don't know what is. But I guess a "champion" of women like Hillary is allowed such appalling speech as long as she touts the far left agenda every chance she gets.
As for Facebook and the other rulers of Silicon Valley, Congress may need to act to draw lines around what is or is not
permissible, including how much of our own data is accessed by and sold to
vendors for their own uses. But each of us needs to take a look at what we put out on social media; what we think it means to others; what we think is meant by social media connections with others; how we weigh it, and how much we can be manipulated by it. Above all, we need to be responsible for knowing what we can and should do to limit access to our own data if we don't want this sort of thing happening in the first place.
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