The problem isn't that FB is slanted, but that FB has a near-monopoly on user attention, which allows its slant to be both covert and disproportionately influential.
If FB was one of a selection of companies competing in the same space, political bias would be less of an issue, because it would be more like the print magazine and blog space.
But then you have the problem that the US gov has an entire network of foundations, think-tanks, blogs, PR companies, astroturfers, bought-and-paid-for journalists, and other "thought leaders" who exist solely to present a specific agenda - usually a pro-corporate one.
In the same way that you can't argue with the Fed, you can't argue with a state-organised propaganda machine - not easily, anyway.
So the problem is much wider than FB.
I couldn't agree more. They also have an unprecedented level of reach (billions of users) and user trust (appearance of community opinion vs. news media filtering).
> So the problem is much wider than FB.
Absolutely. Facebook is far from being the only offender here, and in a way, this is a growing pain of new technology. Just as we learned to not trust big media, we also will have to learn to approach social media with skepticism (despite it's inherently organic appearance).
If you read the article, its quite possible that it was also liberal news, depending on individual curators. Given other FB interventions I've seen, I'd be surprised if, like everything else at FB, the news moderation wasn't just stunningly inconsistent with rampant suppression of left, right, and center according to individual and essentially unaccountable whim.
FB is tolerably usable for basic circle-of-immediate-friends social functions without excessive interference. As far as public communication, news, and advocacy, well, its there, and there's enough people that come to it for that that it can't be ignored, but its fairly horrible for it, not so much from a systematic one-sided distortion but more absolute caprice.
"we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed"
I see what you're getting at, but I highly doubt liberal news was systematically suppressed. Facebook is a notoriously far-left company, located in a region of the US that is already far-left.
Silicon Valley has a fairly substantial right-libertarian and just-plain libertarian segment, which, in the usual way multidimensional politics are smushed into the US two-party, one-axis system, fall out as "conservative", (and quite a lot of really hard to classify on a liberal-conservative axis types that are extremely socially liberal, but economically center-to-right-libertarian (that is, outside of culture-war kind of issues, they tend to agree more with the center-to-right types on the function of government, as well as leaning libertarian on its preferred degree and means of involvement in fulfilling that function); these don't fit well as either "liberal" or "conservative" in the classical sense, and often aren't very "moderate" though they might get classified that way as a result of being very liberal on some salient issues and very "conservative" (as that works out in the US political spectrum) on others.