Two Facebook tools suppressed traffic of conservative sites: Report

One tool was abandoned, WSJ report on internal debates says.

Another one, known as “Informed Engagement,” reduced the reach of posts that were more likely to be shared if even if the sharer hadn’t read the articles, The Journal reported, elevating the content of mainstream outlets. A 2019 company analysis found its impact fell heavily on sites considered to be conservative.

“We could face significant backlash for having ‘experimented’ with distribution at the expense of conservative publishers,” one of the researchers wrote in an internal memo reviewed by The Journal.

The company stopped Informed Engagement but kept Sparing Sharing.

The debate around the tools is part of a broader Journal story published Sunday about internal debates at the social medial giant.

The article pivots on internal chats at Facebook that suggested employees wanted to kick Breitbart out of its NewsTab feature, saying they cast Black Americans in a poor light during racial protests in 2020.

Executives often had to push back against agitation to remove certain content as the platform was caught between the left, which argues the platform disperses hate speech, and the right, which says it is censored by Big Tech.