Facebook buries conservative news?

Is Facebook, one of the world's most powerful distributors of news on the Internet, censoring politically conservative articles?

Facebook denies it, but that's the allegation in a published report that set off a firestorm among conservative media on Monday.

According to tech news outlet Gizmodo, a former Facebook news curator says popular articles from politically conservative outlets on conservative subjects were deliberately left off of the "trending news" sidebar. Among the allegedly verboten topics: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder.

“I’d come on shift and...

The great irony of the tech blog Gizmodo's revelation that Facebook's trending-topic curators weeded out stories about Facebook or about issues popular with conservatives is that Gizmodo's story therefore likely won't end up on Facebook's list of trending topics. After all, the report, which suggests that the social media behemoth's team filtered out stories on conservative topics from conservative sites, will most certainly be very, very popular with conservatives. (Update: Or maybe it will.)

What we're talking about here is that little box in the upper right of your Facebook...