Former contractors who curated Facebook's “trending” news section describe preferred media outlets, “Twitter” censorship, layoffs, more
Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journalists? Here's What Happened When It Hired Some.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece is the opening salvo in a week of curator disclosures: follow-up reporting days later detailed [[a:869425|allegations that curators suppressed conservative news and were told to inject non-trending stories]], including stories about Facebook itself. The through-line is that Facebook's trending module was not the neutral algorithm the company presented — it ran on contractor judgment.
The arc closes two years later when ex-staffers describe the Twitter-inspired 2013 push to surface more news as a failed experiment amid declining time spent on Facebook. That makes this 2016 disclosure a hinge point: it exposed the human curation layer just before Facebook's news ambitions began unwinding.
First-order effects
- Facebook's contractors — journalists hired to run Trending Topics — are now on record describing outlet preferences and instructions to exclude Twitter content, putting the company's 'algorithmic neutrality' framing under direct challenge.
- Facebook faces immediate pressure to justify editorial instructions given to a team it simultaneously treats as disposable, as the layoffs referenced here show.
Second-order effects
- News publishers gain leverage: if trending placement reflects human preference for certain outlets, editors can argue Facebook's distribution is an editorial gatekeeper subject to scrutiny rather than a neutral pipe.
- Rival platforms like Twitter benefit from documented evidence that their content was actively excluded from a major discovery surface.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform news curation migrates from hidden human judgment toward either fully automated systems or formal publisher partnerships — both of which trade one accountability problem (undisclosed bias) for another (opaque ranking or negotiated gatekeeping).
- The episode foreshadows regulators and press treating platform-news interfaces as editorial products, setting up the accountability dynamics later visible in journalists' own accounts of covering Facebook's on-record denials and quote controls.
The trend: Platform news curation is being forced out of the black box: as human-curated modules get exposed as editorial, social networks face pressure to either automate or formally negotiate their role as news gatekeepers.