The panel has also sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking for answers related to the “Trending Topics” row.
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Mark Zuckerberg has spoken out against allegations that Facebook suppressed right-wing news stories from its Trending Topics section, and has invited politicians to discuss the matter in the near future.
“Yes. We take these reports very seriously and will continue to investigate the allegations”.
“We have found no evidence that this report is true”, he said. “If we find anything against our principles, you have my commitment that we will take additional steps to address it”, he writes.
The move is seen as a damage control exercise by Zuckerberg, who has been criticised heavily in the last few days after news reports surfaced by Facebook is censoring certain kind of news. “That’s what makes social media unique”.
“We have rigorous guidelines that do not permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or the suppression of political perspectives”, he added.
In its own blog post, the company said a series of checks and balances – involving both software formulas and humans – ensures that stories displayed in the trending topics section aren’t biased.
“The editorial team CAN inject a newsworthy topic” that doesn’t appear in the main algorithm list, but is in its “demo tool”, which contains stories that were previously blacklisted or missed in the main tool because of a bug. “I want to have a direct conversation about what Facebook stands for and how we can be sure our platform stays as open as possible”, he has further written. To put this in context, Trending Topics is the small box that appears on the upper right side of a Facebook page or when a user taps the search bar in the mobile app that lists news topics that are most popular on Facebook.
Others claimed that they were explicitly instructed by their managers at Facebook to manipulate the trending topics algorithm by inserting topics into the module before they had gathered momentum among Facebook users.
Now, The Guardian has got its hands on leaked documents, and one of which is “Trending Review Guideline”, that is used to train these “news curators”.
“Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to discriminate against sources of any political origin, period”, wrote Justin Osofsky, vice president for global operations.
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The guidelines do show that the journalists in charge of Trending Topics can exercise some editorial judgement when selecting the stories for the side bar.
