Louise Mensch and Milo Yiannopoulos are getting worked up about the revelation that Facebook’s “Trending News” discriminates against right-leaning news sources. This means their outlets Heat Street and Breitbart are being denied traffic by Facebook. Facebook had kinda-sorta pretended that their Trending News function was an algorithm driven objective news curator. Gizmodo revealed that it was actually curated by left-biased human editors. 

Steve Hilton over at CrowdPac gives us a clue why that might be:

CrowdPac shows that Tom Stocky, Facebook’s VP of Search who is responsible for the “trending” feature, is a major donor to Hillary Clinton. In fact based on all his contributions the data shows that he is to the left of Clinton. CrowdPac says the rest of Facebook’s “content team” skews even further to the left based on previous donations to political candidates and causes. So now you know Facebook are probably not politically neutral.

Milo and Mensch are now demanding a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, presumably in a safe space, to discuss this suppressing of conservatives and libertarians after he invited “leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” to share their views. Zuck also denies Facebook is biased. 

So what if Facebook is left-of-centre? Are lefties entitled to a meeting with Rupert Murdoch to complain that the Wall Street Journal is right-of-centre? Louise tweets that even though Facebook is a private firm, “it is governed by terms of business that state objectivity and EU data law too”. No idea what she means by that, nor does Guido think publishers should be required to be even-handed. Guido isn’t in his equivalent “Seen Elsewhere” links.  If a private firm was required to be “objective” in editorial decisions, Guido would oppose that. A free press is not required to meet up to some illusory measure of “objectivity“. Milo and Mensch should stop whining like snowflakes about how unfair it is. Winners compete, not whine.