In a development which surprises few, Facebook was found to be left-biased in their censorship of content on their site, including their supposed suppression of fake news.

John Kyl (yes, THAT John Kyl) was commissioned along with a law firm to do an independent study on the matter, and provide his findings to Facebook.

The eight page report is here: https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress...m-report-1.pdf

The most interesting facts from the report:

- Facebook relies upon proven left-leaning "fact checking" sites in order to determine whether news is fake or not. These include Snopes (very left-leaning), Politifact (moderately left-leaning), Factcheck (moderately left-leaning), and Associated Press (moderately left-leaning). Up until recently, there were zero right-leaning or centrist fact checking sites, though they finally included the right-leaning Daily Caller in 2018 in order to counteract a little of the bias.

- Facebook relies upon the heavily left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center to define "hate speech", and then uses those determinations to remove posts and articles.

- Facebook has an advertising bias which excludes pro-life ads in many cases. However, it is possible that some of this is not intentional, as it sometimes conflicts with their policy not to allow "shock ads", of which pro-life ads sometimes are.

- The hate speech removal policy caused some erroneous removals such as passages from the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the writings of St. Augustine.

- The appeals process basically sucks and is totally non-transparent. Most appeals get denied and no reasons are given.


On a side note, I wonder why there isn't a totally centrist fact checking service yet. The service could hire 50 moderate conservatives and 50 moderate liberals, and then have them vote upon whether something is fake or real news. Or something like that.

There are plenty of conservatives who hate fake news, even if it makes them look good. I'm one of those people. I always call out phony articles when on conservative Facebook groups, and chide those who post them. I imagine there are liberals on the other side who also hate pro-left fake news. A fact-checking organization with an actual goal of determining facts (rather than making their "side" look good) would be very valuable in this day and age.

Factcheck and Politifact try to be this, but they still lean left.

Snopes, which does a great job fact-checking viral internet stuff, is super left-biased and should never be used for political fact checking, but people are tricked into believing them because of their good fact-checking rep regarding viral stuff.