Facebook Introduces "Political Bias" Training For Employees
By Tyler Durden
After former news curators admitted that Facebook routinely suppressed conservative news on its news feed, a training manual was leaked that confirmed there was only one of ten “trusted” news sources by which trending news topics could come from with any type of conservative angle. In the wake of those bad public relations events, the company clumsily tried to save face. Facebook subsequently denied any wrongdoing but still introduced several changes in its policies – put another way, Facebook denied anti-conservative bias but changed policies that produce anti-conservative bias.
After all of the aforementioned events, one would assume that Facebook would lay low and let all of this fade with time, but one would be wrong. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer recently announced that the company would be introducing a “political bias” training program in addition to the managing unconscious bias class the company offers employees.
“We have a managing bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create. And we focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we’re going to add in a scenario now on political bias. So as we think about helping people understand different political points of view and being open to different points of view, we’re dealing with political bias as well going forward.” Sandberg said.
As the Daily Signal reports, Sandberg acknowledged that Facebook and other tech companies are perceived as being liberal: “That’s a pretty important accusation and it’s one we take seriously. It’s also one which frankly rang true to some people because there is a concern that Silicon Valley companies have a liberal bias. And so we took it very seriously and did a thorough investigation and we didn’t find a liberal bias.“
So Facebook has investigated itself, found absolutely no liberal bias, and then changed its policies and added a political bias training program to make sure there is no liberal bias – that sounds an awful lot like fixing something that isn’t broken, unless of course the company knows full well that it has a liberal bias and is trying to hide it, but that would be thinking way too outside the box.
79% of Facebook employee contributions in 2016 have supported Democrats, and those employees have donated more than $114,000 to Hillary Clinton, nearly $100,000 more than to the closest Republican Marco Rubio. Nope, no chance of political bias within Facebook based on those numbers, move along.
Sandberg dismissed the notion that Facebook wanted to be a media company to begin with: “We’re clear about the industry we’re in and the company we’re in: We’re a tech company, we’re not a media company. We’re not trying to hire journalists and we’re not trying to write news.”
Yes a tech company – except when news curators are hired to create the news feed in which 44% of the adults who use Facebook identify it as a primary news source. Other than …read more
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