In the beginning of May, Facebook was hit with allegations that it asked its news curators to suppress conservative news from becoming trending topics in the US.
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Colin Stretch of Facebook’s General Counsel said: ‘These improvements and safeguards are designed not only to ensure that Facebook remains a platform that is open and welcoming to all groups and individuals, but also to restore any loss of trust in the Trending Topics feature.
By removing its reliance on established news outlets, the network aims to “focus on surfacing the conversation on Facebook”, said the company spokeswoman Jodi Seth.
Changes that will be made include updating terminology in Facebook’s guidelines to determine trending topics as to improve clarity, improved training that teaches content on the feature should not be based on poltics or ideology, while increasing additional controls oversight on the Trending Topics team.
In addition, it will remove “the ability to assign an “importance level” to a topic through assessment of the topic’s prominence on the top-10 list of news outlets”.
Facebook said its investigation showed conservative and liberal topics were approved as trending at almost identical rates.
Sen. Thune appears to be pleased with Facebook’s decision to change its curation policy, stating that the company’s willingness to admit that there was a possible bias in its curation adds credibility to the results of its investigation. Also, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a meeting with several conservative politicians and media pundits to address their concerns.
“Moreover, we were unable to substantiate any of the specific allegations of politically-motivated suppression of subjects or sources, as reported in the media”.
But Gizmodo says the “Trending Topics” section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users-167 million in the USA alone-are reading at any given moment.
“Suppressing political content or preventing people from seeing what matters most to them is directly contrary to our mission and our business objectives, and the allegations troubled us deeply.”
According to a statement from the company, Facebook will no longer rely on external news websites or RSS feeds to “identify, validate, or assess the importance of trending topics”.
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Thune, the chairman of the Senate’s commerce committee, said that changes were “encouraging”.
