If you are getting your "news" from Facebook trending stories, then...that's unfortunate.
For real. Who even pays attention to the 'trending stories'?
We can debate the good sense of a person who gets their news from Facebook, but the answer to your question is "a whole lot of people." Facebook boasts about 1.6 billion monthly active users and the Pew Research Center reported in 2014 that about 30% of Facebook users get their news from the site. I imagine if this board had 1.6 billion users, and 480 million of them used it for the expressed purpose of consuming news, we would consider it to be fairly influential.
What about the political suppression (which goes hand and hand with the trending section)? FB's 'vetting' process is only teetering on the edge of propaganda, no biggie...
You're correct I-10, it's crappy they're pushing their agenda. But I don't see it as any worse than the garbage Fox "news" or msnbc "news" channels put out.
Facebook is under no obligation to have journalistic integrity, if there's even such a thing anymore.
But sadly, the masses get their news from facebook.
It's different from Fox and MSNBC because people who consume news understand that humans are making editorial decisions about what to report, how and when. There is an inherent bias, and people have come to accept that. Facebook, however, is not a human being. It's supposed to be an algorithm. What makes Facebook different is that it purports to deliver news that is the most popular - clicked, viewed, read, 'hovered' over, whatever - to its users in the trending section.
In essence, Facebook is claiming to be reporting on how people think. By suppressing the fact that an article on Brietbart, for instance, is the most clicked news article on a network of 1.6 billion people and inserting the myth that a story about, say, Black Lives Matter is the most popular story, Facebook isn't reporting on how people think. They are shaping how people think.
You, the user, are meant to believe that most of the world does not read Brietbart, RedState, and the like. That's just the right-wing "crazies." You are meant to believe that Black Lives Matter is a sweeping, nationwide movement that has come about because police everywhere are gunning down black people for sport.
In reality, however, a lot of regular and decent people do read Brietbart, RedState, and the like. In reality, Black Lives Matter is a response to a problem that, while very real and horrible, is not so widespread as to become a topic of daily conversation on Facebook for most users.
This would all be fine if Facebook was up front about it. It's not fine, though, because Facebook doesn't have an "editorial" section. It doesn't have a "stories picked out for you" section. It has a "trending" section, and they even use little upward-climbing graph arrow icons that seem to say "these things are being placed here based on data gleaned from our users." Which we now know is a lie.
