MOSCOW (Sputnik) – Responding to criticism of anti-conservative bias in its Trending Topics feature, the company said in a Monday statement its internal investigation revealed no evidence of "systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories." The California-based public firm acknowledged, however, that it could not "fully exclude the possibility of isolated improper actions or unintentional bias."
"We will no longer rely on lists of external websites and news outlets to identify, validate or assess the importance of particular topics. This means we will eliminate the 'Media 1K' list, the list of RSS feeds used to supplement the algorithm that generates potential trending topics, and the top-10 list of news outlets," Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch said.
In another effort to "minimize risks where human judgment is involved," the social network said it would eliminate "importance level" tags via a story's presence on the top-10 list of news outlets, and expand its help section to provide more information on how Trending Topic works.
The pledge made in the statement echoed the commitments made in a follow-up letter sent to Chairman of the US Senate Commerce Committee John Thune and Ranking Minority Member Bill Nelson.
Thune and other conservative personalities met with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on May 10, to address accusations of "routinely" suppressing pro-conservative stories that surfaced in tech media the same day.
To date, Facebook’s popular topics were identified by an algorithm and then audited by special review team members to confirm that they are truly trending news in the real world.
