Facebook Responds To Claims Of Censoring Conservative News

The Trending Topics list is a place where Facebook highlights stories that are gaining a lot of traction on the world’s largest social network. If a story figures in that list it happens to get quite a lot of traffic from Facebook, as one would expect. Facebook reportedly relies upon human curators to manage the list and yesterday a report claimed that contractors working for Facebook routinely omitted conservative news from appearing in Trending Topics. Facebook has now responded to those claims.

Several former curators for the company told the scribe that topics popular with conservatives were omitted from the list and that if a story being considered for inclusion came from a conservative news outlet, curators would try and find the same story on a more neutral outlet.

In a statement provided to us, a Facebook spokesperson says that the company takes allegations of bias very seriously and that the social network is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum.

“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,” the spokesperson said.

It seems like Facebook wants to put this matter to rest and it wants to clear up any misconceptions that people might have about it intentionally omitting conservative news.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Web
Tags: Facebook