Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News, by Michael Nunez.

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Facebook are a private company, so they can do what they want — but they shouldn’t imply they are unbiased:

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing — but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.” …

The [trending] section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users — 167 million in the US alone — are reading at any given moment.