Facing an uproar from conservatives and even calls for a congressional inquiry from a prominent lawmaker, Facebook is going to great lengths to explain how it decides what shows up on its trending news notifications.
On Thursday, the company released a 28-page internal document that details the instructions to the humans who shepherd the "Trending Topics" feature. It's the news section that you — and Facebook's 1.6 billion users worldwide — see in the right-hand column of Facebook on desktops or when you do a search on mobile.
What we now know is that trending topics are driven in part by an algorithm and in part by humans. A Gizmodo article this week cited anonymous former contractors from the Trending Topics team, saying that human curators sometimes passed up conservative-leaning topics in favor of more liberal ones.
The release of the internal document represents Facebook's continued pushback against bias allegations. The document was made public for the first time after being shared with The Guardian. As Trending Topics' chief said on Monday, the guidelines do not allow or advise some kind of systematic discrimination against sources with particular ideologies.
What the document shows is how people are involved in the process, sometimes "injecting" newsworthy stories and sometimes "blacklisting" stories, for example, for not being a "real-world" event or for being duplicative. This kind of role of human curators has drawn suggestions that Facebook was becoming more of a publisher — in a traditional sense, like the mainstream news media — than a perfectly neutral platform.
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