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Contrary to what you might have thought, there’s a team of journalists that puts together the “trending” news section on your Facebook page—it’s not a robot’s job (yet). And those journalists, or “news curators,” may not be objective about the news stories they choose to display.
Areport from Gizmodoon Monday suggested that Facebook’s news curators reportedly regularly kept conservative topics and stories out of Facebook’s prominent trending-news section. In response to the report, Facebookinitially issued a statementabout its neutrality guidelines on Monday that didn’t immediately make it clear whether the contractors it hired had violated Facebook’s own rules. Even the Republican National Committee weighed in, outraged. “It is beyond disturbing to learn that this power is being used to silence viewpoints and stories that don’t fit someone else’s agenda,”its statement read. But now, a subsequent statement from the tech giant flat-out denies the allegations made by Gizmodo’s sources.
In a statement on Facebook, the company’s V.P. of searchTom Stockysays Facebook has ”found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true.” In addition, he says, “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.” Other sources suggested that the appearance of bias was actually the result of privileging more mainstream news sources. According to aNew York Times reportMonday citing former Facebook employees, conservative news “suppression” was “based on perceived credibility—any articles judged by curators to be unreliable or poorly sourced, whether left-leaning or right-leaning, were avoided, though this was a personal judgment call.” In other words, Gizmodo’s sources may have exaggerated their claims.
Stocky also denied Gizmodo’s report that trending topics were artificially inserted into the news section, even if they weren’t organically gaining traction with users, including stories related to the Black Lives Matter movement. “We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so,” Stocky said. “Our guidelines do permit reviewers to take steps to make topics more coherent, such as combining related topics into a single event (such as #starwars and#maythefourthbewithyou), to deliver a more integrated experience.”
A former Facebook news-curating contractor who identifies as conservative told Gizmodo that right-wing news topics, in addition to stories from right-leaning conservative news sites like Breitbart or the Washington Examiner, were ignored unless a more politically neutral and mainstream news site also picked up the same story. Former employees told Gizmodo that the directive to ignore or suppress conservative news sources and topics didn’t come from Facebook management, but was based on individual curators’ own personal biases.
(VANITY FAIR)
