But the flap is over whether news from conservative media outlets were suppressed, as one former curator told Gizmodo.
Advertisement
Facebook’s vice president of search, Tom Stocky, said Monday that the company found “no evidence” that the allegations are true.
Thune wrote an inquiryletter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding to know details about how its trending topics work-the type of process Facebook is notoriously tight-lipped about. A Guardian report Thursday said the team was as few as 12 people, citing leaked documents, but Facebook didn’t comment on that number.
A former Facebook contractor who worked as a news curator told Gizmodo this week that his colleagues would remove right-wing topics such as Mitt Romney, Rand Paul and the Conservative Political Action Conference from the site’s Trending news list, even though they were popular enough to qualify.
On browsers, the topics appear on the top right corner, separate from the news feed containing updates from your friends and family.
One issue about this controversy that troubles some is the way that Facebook depicts its role in selecting what news is shown.
About 36% of USA adults say Facebook is among several important ways that they access news, according to Pew Research Center data from a year ago. Stories start out with a “normal” level of importance and can be escalated by Facebook’s editors until they reach the last “Nuclear” level, according to the documents. But there are also those smaller publications out there that are mostly online news sources, or even news aggregate sources that can drive the trending topics as well.
Media lawyer, Mark Stephens, said: “You have crossed the rubicon from platform to publisher if you exert any editorial control over news”.
There’s a team of news editors reportedly working in shifts around the clock who have been instructed on how to “inject” stories into the trending topics module.
“Good on Facebook for highlighting [Black Lives Matter] into their news section”, Snapchat’s researcher and social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson said on Twitter. Algorithms first detect stories that are being widely shared on the platform, then human editors cross-reference the stories to see if they’re being covered by 10 major news outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, BuzzFeed and Fox News Channel. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.
In the wake of the allegations, some conservatives said they always suspected a bias on the part of the company and others said they never expected Facebook to be neutral.
Zuckerberg’s statement – the third dispatch from a company executive in just four days – did not address the question of Facebook’s editorial practices, but instead focused on the question of political bias against conservative viewpoints.
Advertisement
Facebook’s News Feed is entirely algorithm based, which means a bot presents you with what it believes are the most relevant stories and posts based on your behavior.
