In a collision of circumstances, news about how Facebook selects items for its Trending Topics menu and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s reaction to that news were both showing up as trending topics on the social network Friday.
In a Thursday night post on his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg addressed allegations that his company suppressed stories with a conservative viewpoint and kept them out of Trending Topics, a Facebook feature meant to surface noteworthy news events from around the world.
A report earlier this week from Gizmodo stated that former Facebook workers who worked as “news curators” on the trending team wielded influence over what made it into the influential section. The site said that human biases and editorial judgment being imposed onto topics generated by an algorithm was in “stark contrast” to Facebook’s own Help Center information about how Trending Topics is compiled:
Trending shows you topics that have recently become popular on Facebook. The topics you see are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you’ve liked and your location.
On a computer, the topics are grouped into 5 categories: All News, Politics, Science and Technology, Sports and Entertainment.
A story in The Guardian further reveals, thanks to documents the news organization obtained, that human intervention and editorial decisions are taking place at almost every stage of the trending news operation.
Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s vice president of global operations, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that there is “a team of people who play an important role in making sure that what appears in Trending Topics is high-quality and useful” but that potential topics are surfaced by an algorithm.
He wrote that the algorithm “also uses an external RSS website crawler to identify breaking events so that we can connect people to conversations on Facebook about newsworthy events as quickly as possible.” Osofsky provided a link to 1,000 media outlets the Trending team can rely on to corroborate information.
Osofsky said that the Trending team’s guidelines do not “permit the suppression of political perspectives,” that the company takes the allegations in Gizmodo’s reporting very seriously and will continue to investigate.
Meanwhile, the top comment on Zuckerberg’s post about the entire matter came from a user named Lakshman Ponneganti, who got 2,621 thumbs up for writing: “Is it so important to have a Trending Topic that Kim Kardashian or someone else posted a nude photo on her social network? Will be glad to have something more useful in trending topics!”
