This kind of role of human curators has drawn suggestions that Facebook was becoming more of a publisher – in a traditional sense, like the mainstream news media – than a perfectly neutral platform. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another.
Advertisement
About 36% of USA adults say Facebook is among several important ways that they access news, according to Pew Research Center data from previous year.
A blog post from Facebook shines an official light on how the service is supposed to work: an algorithm “surfaces” trending topics on Facebook, using a mixture of keyword recognition and an external list of breaking news from those 1,000 trusted sites.
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., sent a letter Tuesday to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, asking the company to brief Thune’s committee on how the Trending Topics section works and to respond to the bias claims.
The post linked to a 28-page internal document Facebook uses to determine trending topics, after the Guardian published a similar document that was leaked to it.
The company relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team to determine the list of news topics that shows up beside the browser window on Facebook’s desktop version, the Guardian said.
“Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any political origin, period”, Osofsky said in a statement. The trending section appears on the website’s righthand column and is thought to have included its most popular content determined by an algorithm. Editors then review the topic, write a description, and see just how high-profile the story is. 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.
Don’t expect the documents to put the political-bias accusations to rest. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.
The documents also refute Facebook’s claim of a exclusively algorithmic approach to the site’s news coverage: “The topics you see are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, pages you’ve liked and your location”. The team can either inject a topic into Trending Topics, or blacklist it for reasons including that it “doesn’t represent a real-world event”, which is left up to the editors to decide. “We have at no time sought to weight any one view point over another, and in fact our guidelines are designed with the intent to make sure we do not do so”.
Advertisement
“At its core, Trending Topics is created to help people discover major events and meaningful conversations”, Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice-president of global operations, said in a statement on Thursday.
