While it’s unclear whether anything will actually come of said meeting aside from just discussion, it’s possible that Facebook’s move is meant to be a goodwill gesture that keeps it from having to deal with Senate committees keen on looking into the alleged issue themselves.
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Facebook hasn’t said how many people are responsible for the trending topics team.
“We have found no evidence that this report is true”, Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his personal page Thursday.
On Monday, Gizmodo created a storm when it reported that contracted workers at Facebook “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers” and artificially “inject” stories into the trending topics section, citing anonymous former “news curators”.
Beck wrote on Facebook early Sunday morning that “Mark wanted to meet with 8 or ten of us to explain what happened and assure us that it won’t happen again”, adding that he plans to attend.
The Guardian released leaked documents that seemed to show guidelines for Facebook editors on how to pick trending stories.
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The Blaze – the media network founded by Beck – was named in the Gizmodo report as a site Facebook employees were told to stay away from in their compilation of trending links. According to Facebook, potential trending topics are first determined by a software formula, or algorithm, that identifies topics that have spiked in popularity on the site.
The Trending Topics are then personalized for each user via an algorithm that relies on factors including the importance of the topic, the user’s “likes”, location and user feedback about previous Trending Topics.
“The guidelines demonstrate that we have a series of checks and balances in place to help surface the most important popular stories, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum”, Osofsky said of the guidelines provided to a team of people who manage the section.
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“While they are a private business and I support their right to run it any way they desire without government interference”, Beck said, “it would be wonderful if a tool like Facebook independently chose to hold up Freedom of speech and freedom of association as a corporate principle”. “It would be only white men, because the data it had was picking up the sexism and racism of the time, and the data was informing the definition of success”.
