OpinionPolitics

Former employee: Facebook made Black Lives Matter trend by inserting it into news feeds

no pc5 black lives matterEarlier today, we reported that former Facebook “news curators” admitted the social media giant routinely censored conservative news, keeping it out of its “Trending” news section.  Moreover, they said the company would make things artificially trend by injecting it into news feeds.

One of the subjects Facebook made artificially trend is Black Lives Matter.  They even gave it a priority.

The Daily Caller reported:

Facebook staff manually inserted the “Black Lives Matter” topic into its trending news feed in order to artificially boost the movement’s popularity and in turn boost the Facebook brand, according to a former employee who curated news for the site.

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“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the former curator told Gizmodo. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics.”

Black Lives Matter, Rachel Stoltzfoos added, started on Facebook and the liberal media took note of the movement’s rise on social media.  But Monday’s revelation raises serious questions.

How popular would the movement be if Facebook hadn’t artificially inflated it?

“When we injected [Black Lives Matter], everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one,’” a former curator told Gizmodo.

The Daily Caller added:

Mark Zuckerberg reinforced the movement in February, when he scolded his employees for denigrating the movement. “This has been deeply hurtful and tiresome for the black community and really the entire Facebook community, and we are now investigating the current incidents,” he wrote in an internal memo to staff. “I hope and encourage people to participate in the Black@ town hall on 3/4 to educate themselves about what the Black Lives Matter movement is about.”

In short, Facebook — a site now known as the world’s most dangerous censor — crammed this down our throats, which begs the questions: What else have they promoted and what can we expect in the coming months?

Worse yet, how many police officers might still be alive today if Facebook had let Black Lives Matter run its course?

As a final note, Adina Kutnicki, an investigative journalist based in Israel, and I, have signed a deal to produce a book about the social media site that covers these incidents.  That book is set to be published sometime this fall.

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Joe Newby

A 10-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, Joe ran for a city council position in Riverside, Calif., in 1991 and managed successful campaigns for the Idaho state legislature. Co-author of "Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad," Joe wrote for Examiner.com from 2010 until it closed in 2016 and his work has been published at Newsbusters, Spokane Faith and Values and other sites. He now runs the Conservative Firing Line.

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