Facebook faces growing criticism of bias and censoring posts

Facebook is not, as its millions of users around the world had always presumed, everybody’s friend.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has met with conservative political leaders to play down allegations of anti-conservative bias.

Facebook has been outed — it is not, as its millions of users around the world had always presumed, everybody’s friend.

Just as Google had to quietly drop its axiom “don’t be evil”, the sanctity of Silicon Valley’s moral authority took another hit in the past week through revelations that Facebook “curates” the trending news items on its social media platform rather than allow its supposedly neutral “algorithms” to determine them without bias.

The furore, first reported on Gizmodo, the respected IT website, was exacerbated because as Facebook contractors explained, those curators are encouraged to focus on material from mainstream news sites, or what they ­believe is important, rather than news feeds featuring “conservative” items or personalities.

Essentially, Facebook operates as a traditional newsroom, with all its biases and corporate imperatives, rather than as a neutral and unimpeachable tool of audience demand, as it has always been made out to be.

Furthermore, the revelations confirmed beliefs that Facebook, a powerful corporation capitalised at $US117 billion ($161bn) on the NASDAQ ­exchange, has, and perpetuates, a liberal bias — much like the home of Facebook and its IT brethren, Silicon Valley.

Facebook quickly back-pedalled, releasing a statement from its vice president of search, Tom Stocky, saying it took “these ­reports extremely seriously” but “found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true”.

Stocky added Facebook’s “rigorous guidelines … to ensure consistency and neutrality … do not permit the suppression of political perspectives” or the “prioritisation of one viewpoint over another”.

Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, the 32-year-old Facebook founder and chief executive, met conservative political leaders, including a representative of presump­tive Republican nominee Donald Trump, to quell the allegations of anti-conservative bias.

Facebook’s politics in this ­instance is not the key point (and Zuckerberg has been careful to split his allegiances, recently ­announcing a sponsorship deal with both the Republicans and Democrats for their conventions and declining to endorse candidates publicly).

And the importance of its trending section, established in 2014 to counter rival social media site Twitter, is arguable, given it is a minor sidebar on any Facebook page and not the main newsfeed users are drawn to, full of humble brags about your friends’ children, empathetic politics and news articles your friends like.

Even some of the proclivities of Facebook’s vaunted Edge Rank ­algorithm that selects material for individual feeds, which tech site Mashable half seriously describes as “far more valuable than the ­recipe of Coca-Cola or KFC’s 11 herbs and spices”, are known about. It promotes video heavily, though only if the video is ­delivered through Facebook’s own platform, links from your closest friends, boosts articles that viewers read intently, while restricting ­delivery of commercial posts ­unless businesses pay. It is a not-so-neutral net.

We know the main feeds are curated by humans; the shock is knowing that behind the Trending News feed are humans picking and choosing items you believe are unfettered information.

Broadly, any evidence that Facebook acts like a traditional newsroom opens the company to the charge it should be regulated like any other media company, as well as exposing new legal issues concerning copyright, defamation and other legal responsibilities.

And of course, media organisations, including this one (The Australian is published by News Corporation), are increasingly ­antagonistic towards the platform despite still needing to collaborate. Facebook offers a massive audience to journalists but no longer the clicks through to independent news sites. Facebook has become the mega-publisher.

In Australia, Facebook’s power is growing quickly, thanks to a successful push into mobile and, more recently, video. Consequently, “Facebook has become one of, if not the leading player in Australia’s $1.7bn digital display market”, says Venture Consulting chief executive Justin Jameson.

“Facebook has greater penetration and higher usage than any other app, especially among younger demographics. Hence most advertisers feel that they have to be on Facebook.”

But recent history shows Facebook imposes its community standards upon any user or group it deems unsuitable. And when you’re a $US117bn company, it turns out those standards become unpredictable, restrictive and at odds with the mantra of internet companies that “information wants to be free”.

A major sell of the FANG economy (the acronym given to the ­unregulated digital giants — Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google — which dominate the globe) has ­always been its infallibility, that advances in design and technology make the world better on every level. Silicon Valley, the epicentre of the FANG universe, has appropriated the essence of trickle down economics, telling the world that what’s good for technology is good for everybody and, furthermore, Silicon Valley knows just what is good for everybody.

What’s good for Google and Facebook in particular is their ­aggregation of all information under their umbrellas so they can become the two largest advertising companies ever ($US74bn and $US17bn annual revenue respectively). Their vaunted nobility is crumbling as their behaviour emphasises the dangers and ­duality when gargantuan for-­profit corporations build such concentrated power.

And that power is unaccountable and often illogical. Facebook regularly censors posts by Australians. The Australian has recently published stories detailing the ­unhappy experiences of Christian family groups that have found their material censored by Facebook. But it turns out Facebook can be surprisingly non-discriminatory when it blocks postings.

Editor of the left-leaning ­independent media website, New Matilda, Chris Graham is still ­incredulous Facebook suspended the accounts of many of his subscribers when he published a 6000-word speech by Arrernte writer, feminist, unionist and activist Celeste Liddle marking International Women’s Day.

The piece was accompanied by a photograph of two Aboriginal women from the remote central Australian community of Ampilatwatja. They happened to be bare-breasted.

Facebook temporarily banned the post and accounts of users who shared it, saying the image ­breached its community standards on nudity. Graham remains dumbfounded. Images of a naked Kim Kardashian are allowed on Facebook and Graham laughed at an image from the Burning Man festival of a naked woman riding a bicycle with a dildo protruding from its handle bars, saying publication of it showed Facebook’s ­disingenuousness.

“Good luck to her, who cares, but there was no problem with that image,” he laughed. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” he says of finding “clear double standards” in Facebook’s policy.

“I would say in their defence, I can understand their dilemma ­because they’ve got to draw a line somewhere and they literally have to please the whole world — find a community standard that pleases the whole world,” Graham says.

Facebook told Graham the image was unsuitable because of “complaints”. But the source and content of these complaints are not explained. Indeed, they could have been about the content of Liddle’s speech; Facebook won’t tell. If Graham had published the image in a magazine or on TV, the complaints process would be transparent through industry regulatory bodies such as the Australian Press Council or the television’s Code of Practice.

“Small publishers like me should be genuinely terrified,” Graham says. “I got banned so I couldn’t publish, and that’s terrifying for a publisher because we genuinely didn’t publish that image to inflame anything. The rules are, there are no rules other that what Facebook decides.”

The Christian lobby group Family Voice Australia has had at least five posts ­“strangely dis­appear” from Facebook, says Ros Phillips, ­including some the group paid to “boost” (for certain fees, Facebook “pushes” your posts to more users than would happen ­organically).

FVA reported an innocuous story about a Minnesota community’s response to a ban on nativity scenes, and paid $20 to “boost” it. Rather quickly, the “boost” stopped. “When we asked why, they said it did not meet ‘our standards’,” Phillips says. That was after the lobby group had trouble finding someone at Facebook to query, also a common complaint about the site.

According to Graham and Phillips, Facebook’s “standards” are only activated by complaints from users. “Given the number of our readers who got their Facebook accounts suspended, there’s either an awful number of people complaining or a small number of very vocal people complaining, or all is not as it appears at Facebook,” Graham says.

Facebook has a set of “community standards” that sit below its stated mission “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”. Facebook says it ­restricts nudity “because some ­audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content”. ­Explicitly, it says: “genitals or ­focusing in on fully ­exposed buttocks” are out, as are “some images of female breasts if they include the nipple”. But breastfeeding is in.

“Photographs of paintings, sculptures and other art that ­depicts nude figures” are also ­allowed though, again, practice suggests otherwise. Facebook is appealing a French ruling that the social network can be sued over its decision to remove the account of a French user who posted a photo of a famous 19th-century painting, Gustave Courbet’s 1866 The ­Origin of the World, which ­depicts female genitalia.

No matter what your standards or politics are, they are likely more defined than Facebook’s.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was reportedly overheard last year asking Zuckerberg how he could counteract offensive posts about the refugee crisis. In February, he confirmed that Facebook would clamp down on xenophobic posts.

Politicians, of the left, right and in between, appreciate the power of the world’s most potent media platform. Facebook has nearly 1.1 billion active users daily (and 1.6 billion active in any given month) and has grown every quarter of its existence.

Its appeal as a seemingly ­impassive, noble aggregator of ­information was a potent part of its appeal. Seemingly, its proprietor, Zuckerberg, was a kid in a T-shirt with no expansion plans, not some voracious Charles Foster Kane.

But this week’s revelations should give pause. Facebook is a corporation prone to the same foibles and biases any other corporate entity may encounter.

But this is an almighty powerful, unaccountable corporation and it might not be your friend, at least politically, or share your standards.