Gizmodo spoke to five former curators of Trending Topics, who selected trending news from a list topics provided by Facebook's algorithm and picked which news sites each selected topic linked to.
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Gizmodo spoke to five former curators of Trending Topics, who selected trending news from a list topics provided by Facebook's algorithm and picked which news sites each selected topic linked to.
The curators reportedly were told to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets. They regularly would avoid certain sites, such as The Blaze and Breitbart, although they were not explicitly instructed to do so.
They could deactivate or blacklist trending topics, according to the report.
Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote to Zuckerberg, demanding that Facebook answer "these serious allegations and hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news."
"Doesn't every person, company and news agency have a bias?" asked Jim McGregor, a principal analyst at Tirias Research. "Hell, yes."
Editors "must make choices on what news to cover, and that goes for anyone covering the news," he told TechNewsWorld. "Unfortunately that leads to coverage according to personal biases, the agency's biases and the push for clicks. So, is Facebook guilty of anything that other press agencies aren't guilty of? Probably not."
Facebook previously has pledged to remove anti-immigrant posts from its pages in Germany.
Further, Zed Books' Facebook page had been removed following a series of posts on books by Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish journalist critical of her country's government, it said.
"Censoring Web posts and Facebooks is a delicate topic," McGregor said. What should and should not be considered free speech, what's appropriate, and whether governments should get a say in content on the Internet "are all touchy subjects subject to local and regional ethical standards."
Even if Facebook absolutely was unbiased, "folks who disagree with something on, or left off, of Facebook would conclude it's biased," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
Arguing that Facebook is a business and therefore can't afford to antagonize governments of various countries, or, in the case of Germany, is working for the greater good by suppressing hate speech "won't do them any real good because the folks they likely need to convince will have made up their minds and the core goal is to manipulate Facebook," he told TechNewsWorld.