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Facebook or Farcebook? Social network no friend of free speech

Memorial Day on May 30 is a reminder that brave Americans surrendered their lives defending our liberties, but that’s no biggie to data-diddling, left-leaning, rookie journalists monkeying around with free speech on the world’s largest social network.

Facebook kills trending conservative news, boosts traffic to sagging stories with a liberal bias, and crushes an open exchange of ideas, tattled former company geeks to tech blog Gizmodo, demolishing the company’s image as a fair-minded forum for people “to share and make the world more open and connected.”

Facebook denies the accusations, but its self-contradictions are immortalized in the cyber community it is accused of hoodwinking to advance its own politics. Even a cursory glance at the site’s inner workings exposes a robust role in trying to suppress free speech, swing the vote, conduct covert experiments, and rally rogue regimes:

• Facebook employees asked Mark Zuckerberg if they should “help prevent” a Donald Trump presidency, after their boss railed against “fearful voices calling for building walls,” in an apparent reference to Trump’s idea of barricading the U.S. and Mexico border. Yet Zuckerberg bought four homes surrounding his own to keep out the riffraff.

• Facebook tried to influence the emotions of nearly 700,000 unsuspecting users for its 2012 “emotional contagion” study with Cornell University, exploiting the fine print in its data-use policy to expose patrons to positive or negative content only — without their consent — for a nutty survey yielding puny results.

• Zuckerberg lectures America about immigration, but at a White House state dinner last year he meekly asked tyrannical Chinese President Xi Jinping to name his then-unborn child — a request Jinping ignored — instead of demanding he correct China’s human rights abuses, including curbing freedom of expression, association, assembly, and religion — and promoting cruel prison and working conditions.

Facebook and maudling Markie portray themselves as social-justice warriors, but the gossip in the grapevine — and the facts — suggest they are no friends of the ideals brave Americans have died defending on the battlefield.

Follow me on Twitter @BritShavana

Read Shavana Abruzzo’s column every Friday on BrooklynDaily.com. E-mail here at sabruzzo@cnglocal.com.