“When news is as fast as everything else on Facebook, people will naturally read a lot more news,” he said in a Q&A last year, adding that he wants Facebook Instant Articles to be the “primary news experience people have.” 
 
 Facebook’s stranglehold over the traffic pipe has pushed digital publishers into an uneasy alliance with the $350 billion behemoth, and the news business has been caught up in a jittery debate about what, precisely, the company’s intentions are. Curators of the social media company’s ‘trending news’ sidebar purposely leave out stories from rightwing sites, a former employee has alleged 
 
 Facebook’s trending bar deliberately suppresses conservative news, according to a new report. “The one time when we had intervention on a story we did was when Sheryl Sandberg’s husband died,” the ex-employee said. “I was only there for four or five months, but I didn’t see that happening,” the person said. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” the former news curator told Gizmodo. But Gizmodo’s report was challenged by one ex-Facebooker who took issue with its characterization in an interview with the Guardian, saying that newsworthiness was determined by how often a story appeared on a list of trusted news outlets including this publication, the New York Times and the BBC. Emily Bell, director of the Tow centre for digital journalism at Columbia journalism school, said on Twitter that she questioned whether algorithms could ever be impartial. https://t.co/hWm68stLwa via @DCExaminer 
 
 Hugo Gurdon, the Washington Examiner’s editorial director, said: “We’ve read the report, and it is obviously of considerable interest to us. “We reported it as a news story – ‘COO’s husband died in location X.’ A whole bunch of people said, ‘We shouldn’t report on that story,’ and we said, ‘Well, it’s news, so we’re covering it.’ We kept it up and we never got any flack from Sheryl or anyone else.” 
 
 
 
 The feeds, the ex-employee said, were pure popularity among Facebook users, but popularity as determined by human curators: “Beyoncé trends most days, but that’s just because people are posting pictures of Beyoncé.”
– A former curator of Facebook's "trending news" feature says employees often deliberately kept conservative news out of the spotlight, reports Gizmodo. “Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” says the anonymous ex-employee. For example, stories about the IRS' Lois Lerner scandal, CPAC, or topics from the Drudge Report or other conservative outlets wouldn't make the cut, even if they were clearly popular online. As a previous Gizmodo story explained, Facebook has a team of young journalists who provide human oversight to the company's news algorithm and help select which headlines qualify as "trending" in the upper right corner of Facebook pages. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the ex-employee says. The Guardian calls it a "bombshell confession," one that has set off a flurry of interest on the right. Drudge, for example, gave the story prominent play alongside a photo of Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg with the headline, "Not Leaning In ... Leaning Left!” And the conservative Washington Examiner, calling Facebook the "King of News" for smartphones, says the practice could have a "huge and negative impact" on conservative media.