Everyone scrolls down their Facebook newsfeed and read your friend’s latest posts, but is Facebook controlling what posts you see?
In countries like Russia and Pakistan, Facebook has built a way to keep certain restricted information from landing in people’s news feed.
The New York Times is reporting that Facebook has designed software to keep people from seeing content based on geographic areas.
The social media giant even deletes or blocks some content to Americans at the request of our government.
During a six-month period in 2015, Facebook blocked about 55,000 pieces of content.
People go to Facebook to read and respond to friends, family and businesses they trust. People trust that they are seeing a balanced slice of what their friends are posting.
In reality, it is possible that Facebook could suppress positive Trump posts during the campaign and push the negative ones onto people’s newsfeeds. A claim that many conservatives said was happening.
All of the censorship changes at Facebook could be the result of a dream the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has to be in China.
There is a rumor online that Obama turned over the power of the Internet in October to help Facebook get access into China. The rumors of not confirmed, but Facebook and it’s employees support the Democratic Party passionately.
Mark Zuckerberg has been learning Mandarin and has met with President Xi Jinping on several occasions.
There are over a billion people in China and the tightly controlled Internet could be a gold mine for Zuckerberg.
In order to be in China, the social media king will need censor a great deal of content that the government doesn’t allow its people to see.
Currently censorship is a big deal with Facebook and the government. Both want to ban “fake and misleading” content from the platform and the Internet as a whole.
Controlling the media Americans can consume sounds a lot like China and it is scary to think who is actually picking the “trustworthy” news.
Have you ever questioned how a story ended up on your newsfeed on Facebook? If so, let us know in the comments below.
