They also determine what trends constitute “a national story”, often measured by if a topic appears on at least five out of 10 prominent news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company is investigating a report accusing it of a liberal news bias, but has so far found “no evidence” that it’s true.
He wrote: “There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality”.
“With over a billion daily active users on average, Facebook has enormous influence on users” perceptions of current events, including political perspectives”, wrote Sen.
Unlike traditional news outlets – whether they be print, broadcast or online – Facebook is not a news organization.
Potential Trending Topics are first surfaced by an algorithm that identifies topics that have recently spiked in popularity on Facebook (in other words, ones that have a high volume of mentions and a sharp increase in mentions over a short period of time). And while allegedly censoring out trending conservative news, Facebook’s curators covered significant events, albeit significant world news stories, that were not yet trending, which include the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, among other big stories, before they would go viral.
To determine the importance of a story on the Trending list, Facebook’s guidelines for United States editors recommended looking at only ten news sources. The nature of Facebook is that it helps people connect over large distances.
It said also that does not “insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so”. U.S. Senator John Thune, the chairman of the committee, told reporters Tuesday his primary concern was that Facebook may be engaging in deceptive behavior if employees meddled with what trending news was displayed.
A top Facebook executive on Thursday said that the social media platform does not possess any inherent political bias.
Facebook depends on its editorial team to curate news for its trending module, according to leaked internal documents.
Facebook has rebuffed tech blog Gizmodo’s Monday article which alleged that the ranking of “trending topics” on the social network is being manipulated by Facebook employees for political purposes.
“It does.pull the curtain back on this claim of transparency, this claim that social media are reflectively, reliably, and objectively showing you what the world around you is paying attention to”, Wasserman said.
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“Legally, Facebook probably has a right to do this, but I think it’s really questionable ethically”, Silverglate said. In fact, Senate Commerce Committee sent a letter to Facebook asking for more information on the issue.
