“Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature”, Colin Stretch, general council at Facebook, said in the release.
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The changes to Facebook’s Trending Topics section comes in response to an inquiry opened by the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this month.
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”.
Reviewers will not be able to simply assign an “importance level” based on its position in the top 10 news outlets (a list which, per the item above, will no longer even exist).
Facebook has changed some of its internal guidelines for choosing which stories appear in its “Trending” topics section, following accusations of political bias.
Facebook’s policy change Monday appears to be aimed at defusing the palpable tension between it and Republicans outraged over reports that Facebook’s Trending Topics could be biased against conservatives.
Specifically, Facebook looked at how and when stories were “boosted”, “blacklisted”, or submitted to “injection”, or correction – and found that rates “have been virtually identical for liberal and conservative topics”.
“Facebook has been forthcoming about how it determines trending topics and steps it will take to minimize the risk of bias from individual human judgment”, Thune wrote in a statement published today.
As part of the investigation, Facebook has been in constant contact with reviewers, both former and current, supervisors of the reviewing team and contractors. The company’s news operation will no longer rely on a top-10 list of websites – which includes The New York Times, CNN, and The Washington Post – to determine whether a subject is newsworthy or not.
“Attending a meeting with Facebook where you were invited to voice your opinions about their media activity and then voicing them is not an act of shakedown”, conservative blogger Ben Domenech wrote. In fact, it was established that numerous trending topics that somehow were said to be left off the Trending Topics had trended in the past, so there was no grounds for the claim that they weren’t being featured. On the app, trending topics are visible after a user taps the search bar. The list was used in conjunction with an algorithm to find breaking news.
Facebook’s system relies partly on humans who are responsible for approving topics for the Trending Topics module.
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“Facebook’s description of the methodology it uses for determining the trending content it highlights for users is far different from and more detailed than what it offered prior to our questions”, he said.
