The Facebook executive who’s in charge of the social network’s Trending Topics — which are trending because of accusations of bias against conservative news — says the company has “found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true.”
Tom Stocky, vice president of search at Facebook, wrote a post Monday night responding to the allegations. Gizmodo reported earlier in the day that according to unnamed former contractors who curated for the Trending section, news from conservative publications was suppressed by other curators, and that some topics were “injected” into the section even though they weren’t trending.
“Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we’ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible,” Stocky wrote. “At the same time, our reviewers’ actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.”
Stocky also denied that topics such as the anti-police brutality movement Black Lives Matter were force-fed to Facebook users, as one former curator claimed to Gizmodo.
“We looked into that charge and found that it is untrue,” Stocky said. “We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so. Our guidelines do permit reviewers to take steps to make topics more coherent, such as combining related topics into a single event (such as “ª#” starwars” and “ª#” maythefourthbewithyou”), to deliver a more integrated experience.”
The allegations of liberal bias at Facebook, which has become a leading source of news, have given conservative media outlets ammunition.
“In a spirit of transparency and community, we invite Mark Zuckerberg to do a Facebook Live interview with Breitbart News Tech Editor Milo Yiannopoulos to explain to the tens of millions of conservatives on Facebook why they’re being discriminated against,” Alex Marlow, Breitbart editor-in-chief, told Politico. However, the right-leaning publications Politico talked with acknowledged they have no evidence of the discrimination. Marlow said Breitbart News has “remained in the top 25 Facebook publishers for six months.”
In addition, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus weighed in on Twitter Monday:
Facebook must answer for conservative censorship #MakeThisTrendhttps://t.co/G1cpg1j5Papic.twitter.com/4tUA0FZbDf
— Reince Priebus (@Reince) May 9, 2016
The GOP is asking people to add their names to a petition to “demand Facebook stop censoring conservatives.”
Meanwhile, in the light of all this, there are examinations galore of Facebook’s immense influence on the news. Pew Research’s most recent numbers showed that 4 in 10 U.S. adults get news on Facebook.
“Facebook has a First Amendment right to publish content in any way it wants, just as a newspaper or magazine publisher has a free hand in deciding what to print,” Ken Paulson, a former USA Today editor who directs the First Amendment Center in Tennessee, told Fortune.
Still, law professor Eugene Volokh told Fortune: “But it may well be very bad for Facebook’s business if it turns out that it was indeed making these selections based on the politics of the stories.”
The post by Facebook exec Stocky wanted to alleviate those concerns: “We will… keep looking into any questions about Trending Topics to ensure that people are matched with the stories that are predicted to be the most interesting to them, and to be sure that our methods are as neutral and effective as possible.”
Photo from AFP/Getty Images
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