Facebook Agrees to Eliminate Trending News Bias

Stephen Green | 5:34 AM on May 24, 2016

FILE - In this Tuesday, April 12, 2016, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers the keynote address at the F8 Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco. Facebook is under fire after a report from a Gawker site accused it of manipulating its trending topics feature to promote or suppress certain political perspectives. Facebook has denied the claims, but the GOP-led U.S. Senate Commerce Committee has sent a letter to Zuckerberg requesting answers about the matter. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File)

Here’s the story as reported by NBC. I’ll provide a brief translation below.

The company said an internal probe showed no evidence of political bias in the selection of news stories for Trending Topics, a feature that is separate from the main “news feed” where most Facebook users get their news.

But the world’s largest social network said in a blog post on Monday that it was introducing several changes, including elimination of a top-ten list of approved websites, more training and clearer guidelines to help human editors avoid ideological or political bias, and more robust review procedures.

Earlier this month, a former Facebook contractor had accused the company’s editors of deliberately suppressing conservative news. The allegations were reported by technology news website Gizmodo, which did not identify the ex-contractor.

Translation: We did nothing wrong and we’re going to do a better job of hiding it.

I hope that clears things up for you.