Facebook’s trending topics biased like any newsroom

Facebook's trending stories section, a small box on the top right of its website, is edited by journalists, relying as much on their news sense and good old-fashioned editorial guidelines as on Facebook’s own technological solutions to the problem of finding “trending” stories. According to Gizmodo, who interviewed one of the ex-worker of Facebook, the journalists routinely suppressed news stories of interest - about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics - from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

The current controversy makes Facebook's news section look like a customary newsroom, showing the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation, which contrasts to the company’s claims that the trending module records “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

The former curator said, “We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic. If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.”

Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University says, “I believe that what happened with these curators is that they wanted to avoid embarrassing mistakes. Particularly because they had no real power at the company, they had no authority. And so they wanted to only pick reliable news."

Rosen further added, “The easiest way to do that – not a particularly smart way – but the easiest way is to only pick things that are being published by major news organizations. In an environment like that, a story that is only circulating on right-wing blogs and conservative news sites may, in fact, be left out for reasons of bureaucracy more than bias.”

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a post on Facebook responding to these allegations. Zuckerberg said, “To serve our diverse community, we are committed to building a platform for all ideas. Trending Topics is designed to surface the most newsworthy and popular conversations on Facebook. We have rigorous guidelines that do not permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or the suppression of political perspectives.”

He further added, "The reason I care so much about this is that it gets to the core of everything Facebook is and everything I want it to be. Every tool we build is designed to give more people a voice and bring our global community together. For as long as I'm leading this company this will always be our mission."

The lack of any editorial ombudsman in the company, Rosen argues, means that “they don’t have any way to answer questions about the priorities that go into news feeds. They occasionally release information about it: occasionally they’ll put little updates on the blog. But there’s no systematic way for them to reveal what their editorial judgment is because they’re not at the point where they can really say to themselves: ‘We make editorial judgments.”