POLITICS: Demand answers NOW on Big Tech’s biased news feeds

Congress and the Federal Trade Commission both need to investigate the blatant bias of Apple’s news app — the latter for deceptive and unfair business practices that abuse the company’s market power; the former, because CEO Tim Cook and his minions must publicly answer questions about how and why Apple is doing this.

Question Google’s Sindar Pinchai, too, and perhaps Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg: While Meta’s been doing better of late, our own experience is that those companies’ “news” selection leans markedly left, too.

The entire Trump administration took office vowing to take on Big Tech censorship of conservatives, but looks to have gotten caught up in other issues; now would an excellent time to pick up the ball.

Credit the Media Research Center with reviving the issue with its smoking-gun study of lefty bias in Apple News’ marque morning feed — which as of Monday had gone 96 straight days without showcasing a single story from a conservative publication in its top stories.

Of 620 total stories featured in its high-traffic AM slots in January, over two-thirds (440) came from left-leaning outlets; the other 80, from centrist ones.

Media outfits deemed right-leaning — including the one you’re reading right now — got completely shut out.

Yes, MRC is a righty outfit — but it relied on right-center-left classifications done by the nonpartisan organization AllSides.

How much of the bias comes from Apple’s in-house editors, and how much from their (plainly skewed) algorithm is just one of the obvious questions.

Indeed, question every Big Tech firm about its “news” algorithms.

Sure, they’re private enterprises entitled to lean however they like — but they also make promises to consumers that this bias may break.

FTC chief Andrew Ferguson this week wrote Apple’s Cook urging “a comprehensive review of Apple’s terms of service” to “ensure that Apple News’ curation of articles is consistent with those terms and representations made to consumers.”

And, if it isn’t, “to take corrective action swiftly.”

Whatever the legalities, basic fairness is a real issue: Those 620 stories included 34 by The Guardian, a proudly left-of-center publication, and 25 by the unmistakably progressive NPR.

Both outlets do some solid reporting, but so does The Post — and, again, we were shut out completely despite being one of the nation’s leading-exposure news outlets.

Apple protests that, 1) its app provides access to The Post and other right-of-center outlets among roughly 3,000 publications, and 2) anyone can customize their feed to favor different sources.

But that hardly makes up for the default product the company carefully curates for the general reader.

And, again, it’s a problem all across Big Tech: In 2023, AllSides did its own study of bias at the 10 most popular news-aggregations services; “right-leaning media is really underrepresented,” observed AllSides’ Julie Mastrine.

Team Trump should be living up to its promises: It’s grand that Ferguson is  following up now on the MRC’s findings on Apple, but it’d be nice to hear the status of the FTC inquiry he launched a full year ago into “potentially illegal” Big Tech censorship, including “shadow banning” — covert exclusion of certain viewpoints.

Again, it seems to us that most aggregators neglect our news, despite their pretensions of neutrality; Congress and the appropriate regulators should be demanding explanations from every one of them.