Come now, you didn’t think everything over at Facebook was above board did you?

Former Facebook employees have come clean about some of what went on behind the scenes over at the the Zuckerberg empire, admitting that they ‘suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section’.

Those would include stories about Mitt Romney, Rand Paul and other conservative leaders – even though they were actually trending across the site. Over to Gizmodo:

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all…

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.”

Shocker, Facebook isn’t completely honest.

Over at Huffington Post they laid bare why this just ain’t cricket:

Zuckerberg’s social network has evolved in recent months into a very different platform than the one you originally signed up for. As it combats a decline in “personal sharing“ — photos of your family and emotional status updates, for example — Facebook has aggressively invested in new products designed to keep you locked into its home base rather than wandering off to other apps or websites.

…The social network, likely the most important single portal into the Internet today, wants to be in control of every interaction on its platform; that “trending” stories are often injected by human staffers rather than an automated computer program is merely the latest example of this fact.

The company is a media monster now — perhaps as a start its trending stories should be labeled “editor’s picks” to help people understand what they’re really dealing with. It’s certainly not all the product of magical computer programs.

Hey, I’ll take a hand-picked ‘trending’ story over the crap most people share.

The bottom line is that Facebook has been lying to you – your old friend from high school doesn’t live as glamorous a life as he or she would have you think, and sometimes you’re having your ‘trending news’ hand-picked for you.

Just try and stay offline for a month though – Zuckerberg dares you.

[sources:gizmodo&huffpost]

[imagesource:here]