Social Media Behemoths Increasingly Display Political Bias

Your discreet political leanings are no more a secret. They will be determined by the social media trail that you leave behind in cyberspace.

In some cases, social network users run the risk of being branded supporters of a certain political belief that they do not necessarily subscribe to.

For instance, if you like the page dedicated to Hillary Clinton, Facebook might categorise you as a liberal.

Similarly, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has paid for its advertisements to be shown to those whom Facebook has labelled politically moderate.

All this labelling happens without the user being aware of it.

Facebook has also initiated a disturbing new trend where its human managers have been shown the door with their places being usurped by “machine managers.” This follows a recent controversy over allegations of political bias in their trending topics—something the social network has denied after an inquiry.

According to a report, Facebook has sacked its entire editorial staff in the trending team and it will now be staffed by engineers who will check that topics and articles surfaced by the algorithms are newsworthy.

However, booting out editorial hands from trending does not necessarily eliminate the bias as they can be embedded into algorithms and are extremely difficult to remove.

Facebook’s increased reliance on automation reflects its growing faith in machine intelligence. But even machines may fail to overcome some the most fundamental problems that humans face, like operating fairly in the face of embedded biases.

Google, on the other hand, has been accused of burying internet searches allegedly connected to the Clintons.

The search engine is reported to have altered an algorithm to prevent searches for “Clinton body count” from auto-completing. But when users begin to enter the phrase on Bing or Yahoo search engines, the phrase auto-completes as the top result.

The “Clinton body count” is a long list of people tied to the Clintons who have died in suspicious circumstances since the early 1990s.

Interestingly, negative stories about Trump and former Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, still auto-complete on Google raising further questions of bias.

Computer giant Apple has also been accused of feeding users with pro-Clinton and anti-Trump propaganda.

Over the past year, Apple twice refused to publish a satirical Clinton Emailgate game, “Capitol HillAwry,” claiming it was “offensive” and “mean-spirited”. It, however, approved dozens of games poking fun at Trump— including a game called “Dump Trump”, which depicts the GOP nominee as a giant turd.

Twitter, another possible culprit, has come under criticism for banning conservatives and Trump supporters without providing satisfactory answers to their actions.

It was revealed that the social media giant’s top executive personally protected the U.S. President from seeing critical messages last year. “In 2015, then-Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama.”

This year, Twitter isn’t just banning conservatives— the platform also changed its algorithms to promote Clinton while giving negative exposure to Trump.

Instagram is also following suit with banning accounts that depict Clinton in a negative light.

In June, a conservative comedy group was banned with no warning and, last week, a popular Australian-based graffiti artist was banned from Instagram after he posted photos of a bikini-clad Clinton mural he had painted.

It is no different here in India with Twitter being accused of stage-managing trend topics based on political biases and playing a role in verification.