Is Facebook suppressing how much content appears from conservative news outlets? Either way, the controversy points to larger concerns over Facebook's power in media.

Conservative Controversy

On Monday, Gizmodo published a report based on interviews with "several former Facebook 'news curators'" who said they "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers" from the platform's relatively new trending news section.

"Depending on who was on shift," said one of Gizmodo's anonymous sources, "things would be blacklisted or trending." Specific examples of news story suppression included articles on a former IRS official accused by Republicans of inappropriately targeting conservative groups, stories from the conservative site the Drudge Report, and articles about conservative Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

"I'd come on shift and I'd discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn't be trending," said one of the former curators, "because either the curator didn't recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz."

Reactions

Some conservative media outlets are saying they're not surprised by the charges. Alex Marlow of the conservative site Breitbart News said the Gizmodo report confirmed "what conservatives have longs suspected: Facebook's trending news artificially mutes conservatives and amplifies progressives."

Tom Stocky, VP of search for Facebook who is responsible for running "Trending Topics," responded on his Facebook page saying, "We take these reports extremely seriously, and have found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true."

Stocky added, "There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another."

A Deeper Dilemma

The veracity of the claims by Gizmodo's sources is hard to judge, given that none of the former Trending Topics curators would identify themselves publicly.

But whether or not there was a conspiracy of suppression, as some have taken the report to mean (and to be fair, the Gizmodo report never claimed that higher ups had explicitly ordered the suppression of certain political content), there's a real reason for the general unease about Facebook underlying this controversy.

Facebook (and Google and others, to a lesser extent) has enormous power over what news media reaches your eyes. Even if there is actually no suppression of certain conservative topics or sources in Trending Topics, the contemporary reality is that Facebook, with its 1.6 billion active users, is a major gatekeeper for news media.

And Facebook has rules (mostly in the form of algorithms) about what gets seen and what doesn't. Political or not, Facebook's massive userbase means it has a lot of control over public conversation, and that control is in the hands of a for profit company that is largely presided over by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. As Vox noted, with the latest set of non-voting stocks that Facebook wants to issue, not even the majority of shareholders will have any control over the company.

This is much different than the early Internet, where AOL was the only major company to curate content in such an influential way and where most published content was up for grabs on an even playing field in the chaotic wild west of the early web. And it's different than in the pre-Internet 20th century, where media was certainly less diverse and sprawling as it is now, but where government regulations on broadcasters offered some measure of accountability.

How Much Power?

One visual counterargument to the unease many in media feel about Facebook's power as a meta-gatekeeper is what appeared on Trending Topics yesterday: Gizmodo's report.

It's true that the media rulemaking isn't made in a dark smoke-filled back room in Menlo Park California, it's done through algorithms whose main objective is to provide content to each user based on what might specifically be interesting to them. That's actually a problem in itself, contributing to the "filter bubble" effect that eliminates any opposing viewpoints from visibility and arguably contributes to political polarization.

But the point illustrated by Gizmodo's report trending on Facebook is that these Internet media companies ultimately have limits how much they can boost or inhibit content, especially if it goes viral.

And of course there's still the relatively wild web -- full of opposing viewpoints and content so diverse and vast it's never before been seen in the world. It's readily available to anyone with an Internet connection, and outside of Facebook's purview.

The troubling question is whether or not most people go there these days.

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