Months after allegations surfaced that conservative sites and news stories were being kept from Facebook’s trending-news section, the social media giant has devised a solution to its bias problem: replacing fallible human editors with software.
In the past, Facebook contractors wrote the descriptions that accompanied the trending topics of the day on the company’s Web site. Now, algorithms will “pull excerpts directly from stories,” Facebook said in a blog post Friday. Still, humans aren’t disappearing entirely: only the descriptions will be automated, and Facebook employees will still cull a list of trending topics, taking out any that aren’t appropriate, according to Facebook’s standards. “There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality,” the company blog post says.
Several months ago, Facebook found itself in hot water after a series of reports from Gizmodo alleged that Facebook’s news-curation team kept conservative news topics and stories out of Facebook’s prominent trending-news section. Former employees told Gizmodo that even if right-wing topics or news sources were trending, they were often suppressed. Facebook’s V.P. of search responded with a statement denying virtually all of the Gizmodo report, saying Facebook “found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true.” But then came a subsequent report from The Guardian, which seemed to contradict Facebook’s statement and confirm parts of Gizmodo’s: according to leaked documents obtained by the outlet, Facebook’s trending-topics team gave editors the privilege of injecting or removing topics from the trending-news bar, at their discretion—something Facebook outright denied.
While the Menlo Park, California company continues to reject allegations of bias, the move away from employing people to generate its trending-news section is an acknowledgement of its bias problem, whether real or imagined. “This is something we always hoped to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year,” Facebook said in its blog post.
