It has been claimed that Facebook “news curators” excluded politically conservative news stories from the Trending Topics sections of the company’s apps and website. Facebook first introduced Trending Topics in 2014 to help users discover content that is both popular in the world and of interest to them. Facebook surfaces three trending topics in the top right-hand corner of their News Feeds.
As the allegations that the world’s largest social network censors politically conservative stories set off a firestorm among conservative media, Facebook directly denied the allegations following Technology blog Gizmodo’s report that conservative trends were suppressed in Facebook's Trending section and news curators were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module.
“We take these reports extremely seriously, and have found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true,” wrote the company’s Vice President of Search Tom Stocky, whose team is responsible for Trending Topics. “Facebook stands for giving everyone a voice,” Zuckerberg also wrote in a Facebook posting.
Gizmodo, the tech news website run by Gawker Media, published a story with accusations from a person identified as a former Facebook “news curator” that fellow curators kept politically conservative news events from appearing in Trending Topics.
According to US press reports, the Senate Commerce Committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to make Trending Topics staffers available to answer questions about how the Facebook’s Trending Topics feature works.
According to The Wall Street Journal, media scholars say using human editors to curate trending topics inevitably introduces biases, both conscious and unconscious.
The WSJ quoted Jason Turcotte, assistant professor of communication at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, as saying that: “At the core, this controversy is really about Facebook’s gatekeeping powers. I think Facebook has a responsibility to be transparent about its gatekeeping processes and newsmaking decisions, but I also believe that the site can remain a platform for the free flow of ideas and perspectives without sacrificing journalistic responsibility.”
Gatekeeping is the process through which information is filtered for dissemination by gate keepers (news editors).
Facebook’s trending topics controversy warns us about the dangers of news curation by social networking sites in this ‘mobile first’ or ‘mobile only’ era.
News curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. News curation tools help show a personalized list of popular topics for each user, combining their interests with content getting the most attention across the entire platform. As smartphones became inseparable from our daily lives and social networking sites have become one of the most powerful communication tools, Internet companies, as well as media outlets, are increasingly adopting new curation as their way of distributing news.
Facebook released its 28-page editorial guidelines for the trending topics feature. According to the guidelines, Facebook determines which topics are trending with an algorithm intended to recognize "a sharp increase in popularity," and Facebook's curators shape computer-generated lists to select and present highlighted topics.
Facebook fights charges of political bias, saying that much of its news gathering is determined by machines. However, the guidelines also show human intervention and editorial decisions made at almost every stage of Facebook’s trending news operation. Consequently, Facebook’s the trending topics feature cannot be free from controversy over net neutrality.
Naver and Daum, South Korea’s two dominant portals, are no strangers to controversy surrounding net neutrality. News distributors edit portal settings and curate news contents, so they will never be able to stay completely clear of political bias charges.
