An Apple executive today said that the top news stories for Apple News are “handpicked” by an editorial team, arousing suspicion that left-wing bias is at play in the stories we see on its news app.
Apple News editor-in-chief Lauren Kern told an audience at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that Apple’s popular news app serves users the “stories you want to read pulled together from trusted sources.”
“Our top stories are handpicked by the Apple editorial team to make a great collection of curated content,” she said.
Facebook ran into trouble with conservatives two years ago when former editors blew the whistle on the practice of using “news curators” to handpick news content and weed out conservative points of view.
Former editors for Facebook’s news aggregation service told Gizmodo that they had “the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to.” While selections for stories are automated, the “news curators” claimed some sources and topics were “blacklisted” to avoid exposing readers to conservative points of view.
In an effort to resolve allegations of bias against conservatives, Facebook changed its process for trending topics.
In a Ted Talk last Feburary, investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson explained that the media is trying to manipulate opinions when it tries to “shape or censor facts and opinions rather than report them.”
Apple’s WWDC is going on from June 4 to June 8 in San Jose, California.
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