Fresh off his congressional testimony, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is showing no signs of relenting on his attack against conservative news outlets.
According to Buzzfeed, the social media behemoth will be implementing “a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.”
Zuckerberg says that Facebook compiled data on the trustworthiness of certain news brands based on consumer perception.
“We put [that data] into the system, and it is acting as a boost or a suppression, and we’re going to dial up the intensity of that over time,” he said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”
Unsurprisingly, the group of media executives that Zuckerberg shared his new metric with on Tuesday were all representatives from predominantly left-wing publications: BuzzFeed News, The Information, Quartz, The New York Times, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, Recode, Univision, Barron’s, The Daily Beast, The Economist, HuffPost, Insider, The Atlantic, New York Post, and others.
Zuckerberg reportedly promised that Facebook will invest “billions” of dollars into creating an artificial intelligence that works in concert with “tens of thousands of human moderators” to flag fake news and propaganda. Such standards will most likely apply to outlets like The Daily Wire while articles from The New York Times celebrating Karl Marx as a pioneer of economic justice will have free reign.
“We’re essentially going to be losing money on doing political ads,” said Zuckerberg in reference to the Russian bots that interfered in the 2016 election. “The big miss is we didn’t expect these kind of coordinated information operations. We deployed AI tools that have taken down tens of thousands of accounts.”
The changes in Facebook’s algorithms have also taken a major toll on the distribution of conservative news. From Western Journal:
Facebook’s much-publicized demotion of publishers’ content in users’ news feeds has negatively impacted conservative-leaning publishers significantly more than liberal-leaning outlets, an analysis by The Western Journal has revealed.
Liberal publishers have gained about 2 percent more web traffic from Facebook than they were getting prior to the algorithm changes implemented in early February.
On the other hand, conservative publishers have lost an average of nearly 14 percent of their traffic from Facebook.
This algorithm change, intentional or not, has in effect censored conservative viewpoints on the largest social media platform in the world. This change has ramifications that, in the short-term, are causing conservative publishers to downsize or fold up completely, and in the long-term could swing elections in the United States and around the world toward liberal politicians and policies.
Trump-supporting YouTube stars “Diamond and Silk” recently testified on Capitol Hill regarding the censorship they faced from Facebook.