Politics

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg promises more suppression

While participating in an “OTR,” an annual “off the record” meeting intended for new media news executives to talk shop, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company is working on ways to ramp up the suppression of certain news sites, Buzzfeed reported.

According to Buzzfeed:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday that the company has already begun to implement a system that ranks news organizations based on trustworthiness, and promotes or suppresses its content based on that metric.

Zuckerberg said the company has gathered data on how consumers perceive news brands by asking them to identify whether they have heard of various publications and if they trust them.

“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,” Zuckerberg said. “We feel like we have a responsibility to further [break] down polarization and find common ground.”

The report adds:

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Zuckerberg said the company will invest “billions” of dollars in a combination of artificial intelligence and tens of thousands of human moderators to keep both fake news and deliberate propaganda at bay, especially in elections.

“We’re essentially going to be losing money on doing political ads,” he said of the investment the company is making to avoid a repeat of the spread of Russian propaganda in the 2016 US election.

His comments, Buzzfeed said, were initially intended to be off the record, “but he agreed to answer questions on the record.”

As we and others have reported, empirical data from multiple studies show that Facebook’s recent algorithm changes have significantly hurt conservative sites like this one while boosting more liberal outlets like CNN.

With this statement, it seems that Zuckerberg is tacitly admitting that some sites are deliberately targeted for suppression, and the situation will only get worse over time.

How much worse is impossible to determine at this time, but the Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft suggested that at the rate things are going, conservative voices will be eliminated from the platform by election day.

“There should be no doubt left,” he said. “Facebook is determined to shut out conservative pro-Trump voices.”

“Where the hell is the GOP?” he asked.

Good question.

We reached out to Facebook for comment, but did not receive a reply at the time of this writing.  We will provide an update if we receive a response.

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Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad
Banned: How Facebook enables militant Islamic jihad – Source: Author (used with permission)

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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