What's important here is that Facebook is not covered by those laws, simply because it did not exist when the laws were created. In my view it should be covered by those laws.
One defence Facebook might consider is to say that it simply reflects the preferences of its readers algorithmically. However, this article shows that is not the case, and that the company does exercise editorial judgement. Of course, the design of the algorithms is tacit editorialising anyway, so the whole point is moot to me.
While we are considering the fact that FB is a private company (actually a public company), some might be inclined to say that if users realise Facebook cannot be trusted, then they will leave the site causing its revenues to decrease. Other more honest and transparent competitors will take its place. However, in practise there are many reasons to think this won't happen, which is why we have special laws for the press in the first place.
Is Fox "News" covered by these laws? Surely you're not suggesting with a straight face that Fox News is "fair and balanced" ?
It happens on both sides, and it wouldn't be unreasonable to argue that the left is much more guilty of this than the right. Fox News has become a meme because it is the only mainstream news source that blatantly shows conservative bias. Try pointing to mainstream news sources that blatantly show liberal bias and you'd lose count.
No, it just has slightly weaker right-wing bias than Fox.
They have de facto supported nonsensical positions because CNN pioneered the "two sides to every argument" stupidity in their effort to look "unbiased". CNN's reporting is heavily distorted, but the distortion is usually giving credibility when it isn't deserved. Fox simply pushes their agenda directly, while CNN gives cranks a stage no matter how stupid their position is, because calling out even the obviously wrong is "biased". Often this involves conservative opinions (for varying definitions of "conservative"), but almost every opinion of every topic gets the same treatment from CNN.
As long such practices are declared.
People tend to look at "what's trending" in an effort to optimize/manipulate their content so that users would "trend" on it. The fact that FB was artificially eliminating stories gave false results to observers.
Another way of looking at this is if Nielson were to lower the rankings of shows it disagrees with and affecting the duration of those shows.