Under siege over liberal political bias in its highly influential “Trending Topics” news widget, Facebook is now pledging to offer its employees mandatory training on how to “check their political biases.”
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer told a small meeting of political and communications leaders at the American Enterprise Institute that Facebook is looking forward to dispelling the rumor that they lean leftward — at least as far as news coverage is concerned. “We think about helping people understand different points of view and being open to different points of view,” she told attendees. “We’re dealing with political bias as well going forward.”
Sandberg noted that “political bias” will now be added to a larger training program that helps the tech company’s employees tackle other sorts of biases — against race, gender, and national origin. The training will be mandatory.
The change comes after allegations that Facebook employees responsible for selecting “Trending Topics” for a Facebook news feed widget were ignoring conservative and right-leaning news outlets. Yesterday, it was revealed that Facebook Live’s grants program also suffered from bias in the outlets it funds. Facebook maintains that it was all just an honest mistake.
Sandberg did acknowledge in the meeting that Facebook has a definite image problem, as does the tech industry as a whole. She didn’t mention that part of that image problem stems from her outsized political contributions, mostly to Democrats, but she did say that when they really listened to complaints, some of them “rang true.”
“We think a lot about diversity at Facebook. It’s something our industry has struggled with, we’ve struggled with,” she told AEI’s Arthur Brooks in the Facebook Live event. “We think to build a product that 1.6 billion people use, you need diversity. And what you really want is cognitive diversity and intellectual diversity.”
She also said she hopes being more open about the bias incidents will help encourage people within the company to be more open about their political leanings and challenge the status quo.