Mumbai: A few days after a journalist involved with Facebook’s ‘Trending news’ project alleged that the company’s staff had been silently suppressing conservative news stories, Facebook brushed off the allegations on Tuesday, technology website Gizmodo reported.
According to a former report, the journalist who wished not to be named, explained that some of the social networking website’s staff manually prevented conservative news from appearing in the trending news section, even though they were popular among the site’s audience.
Other than that, several other former Facebook news curators also revealed that they were ‘instructed to artificially insert a few stories to the site’s trending news section, even if they were not as prominent.
Moreover, the so-called ‘curators’ were also strictly directed not to put any controversial news pertaining to Facebook itself in the trending section.
Gizmodo’s Technology editor Micheal Nunez pointed out in the article that Facebook’s news sections works similarly to regular newsrooms; there is significant bias among the company’s curators, and also the focus is more on the ‘institutional imperatives of the company.
The fact that it imposes human editorial values on to a set of algorithmically maintained list of topics goes against what the company’s claims regarding the mechanism followed by the trending news module.
Fresh allegations surfaced after Gizmodo had revealed the inner functions of the company’s trending new team. Some of the curators also accused the company of having an 'aversion towards right-wing news sources'.
If this report is genuine, it will have a significant impact on what people read and comprehend. Facebook is a platform where billions of people log in to view trending content; most news websites depend on the platform for extending their target audience.
While the report has cited numerous sources who used to worked as curators for the company’s trending section, Facebook has vehemently denied the accusations.
In a statement to BuzzFeed and TechCrunch, a spokesperson said, “We take allegations of bias very seriously. Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.”
Also, The Vice President of Search at Facebook, Tom Stocy, posted a statement condemning the report.
