After denying charges of political bias, Facebook said on Monday that it had changed some of the procedures for its “Trending Topics” section. But the company still maintains that an internal probe found no evidence of bias.
Earlier in May, a former Facebook contractor had accused the company of suppressing conservative news in the technology news website Gizmodo. This led Republican Senator John Thune to write a letter to Facebook demanding to know how the editors select news articles for the Trending list.
Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature. In fact, our analysis indicated that the rates of approval of conservative and liberal topics are virtually identical in Trending Topics.Colin Stretch, Facebook General Counsel
Facebook was unable to substantiate any specific accusations of bias made in media reports, which relied on anonymous sources, Stretch said in a letter, a copy of which was made available by the leading social network.
The company updated its guidelines to be clearer and gave reviewers training that emphasised content decisions may not be based on politics or ideology, the letter said.
The review team will be subject to more oversight and controls, and Facebook will no longer rely on lists of external websites and news outlets to assess the importance of topics in stories.
Facebook said that its investigations showed that conservative and liberal topics were approved as trending topics at nearly identical rates. But it did not rule out human error in selecting topics.
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg too said that Facebook is a “platform for all ideas” in a post on Facebook after a meeting at the company’s California headquarters to discuss the allegations about anti-conservative bias.
(With inputs from PTI and Reuters.)
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