Facebook has come out swinging against charges of political bias in the news stories it promotes to its 1.6 billion users. In addition it surfaces the most popular topics regardless of ideology and it does not allow its news team to “discriminate against sources of any political origin.”
The Facebook management has introduced a new tool, trending topics. Trending topics is the small box that appears in the upper right of a Facebook page or when a user taps the search bar in the mobile app that lists news topics which are most popular on Facebook.
Trending topics is one of the common tool in twitter under the name “trending hashtags”.”At its core, trending topics are designed to help people discover major events and meaningful conversations,” Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice-president of global operations, said in a statement on Thursday.
Facebook released a 28-page internal document detailing how computer algorithms and news editors determine what news stories are the most popular on the giant social network and outlining editorial guidelines for the team of editors who oversee the trending topics feature.
News stories that are frequently mentioned or are frequently mentioned in a short span of time on Facebook are first surfaced by a computer algorithm, the company said.
Then, a trending topics team review the stories to confirm that the topic is a news event, writes a description backed up by at least three of a list of more than 1,000 media outlets, adds a category label such as sports and makes sure the topic is being covered by most or all of 10 major media outlets including USA TODAY, the Washington Post, CNN and Fox News. Trending Topics are then tailored to the interests of each user.
According to the document released by Facebook on Thursday, the team relies on 10 trusted news websites to determine the newsworthiness of a story. A second list of 1,000 trusted sources is also consulted, according to Facebook. But, wrote the Guardian, “the guidelines are sure to bolster arguments that Facebook has made discriminatory editorial decisions against right wing media. Conservatives would label the majority of Facebook’s primary sources as liberal.”
Editors who work or used to work on the trending topics team are not permitted to speak publicly about their work by non-disclosure agreements. These NDAs prohibit those individuals from saying anything about how the project works and have no expiration date, one former news editor told BuzzFeed.
The editorial guidelines seemed to undercut a statement from Facebook’s vice president of search Tom Stocky on Tuesday in which he said Trending Topics showcases “the current conversation happening on Facebook.” Stocky also said that Facebook does not “insert stories artificially into trending topics.”