Facebook denied the charges that it was politically biased against conservative political opinions and said that an investigation had “found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true”.
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A report in technology website Gizmodo recently accused Facebook of an editorial bias against USA conservative news organisations, sparking sharp reactions from across the spectrum.
In a statement, Facebook wrote: “Our goal is to enable Trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied exclusively on summarizing topics by hand”.
The feature was previously overseen by a team of humans, who wrote brief descriptions of popular news stories across the world in the upper right-hand corner of the Facebook home page.
“Earlier this year, we shared more information about Trending in response to questions about alleged political bias in the product”, it said.
The social media giant will rely more heavily on an algorithm to operate the feature – which lists what news or events are hot topics – no longer requiring people to write descriptions, according to a Facebook blog post.
The goal of this empowerment of Trending is to enable as many individuals as could reasonably be expected, which would be hard to do if we depended exclusively on compressing subjects by hand.
Facebook has said that topics are selected by algorithms that consider how often users post or share articles.
Trending topics will no longer display a description, instead showing the number of people discussing the trend.
Humans will still be involved in the process to ensure that topics are real-world news and not based on an internet trend like #lunch.
The review team became subject to more oversight and controls, and Facebook stop relying on lists of external websites and news outlets to assess the importance of topics in stories.
“A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time”.
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The social network said the changes had been implemented more quickly than originally planned given the “feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year”. “Our team will still strictly follow our guidelines, which have been updated to reflect these changes”.
