UPDATE: In a statement published Thursday night, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg denied reports that Facebook screens out conservative viewpoints from its highly influential “trending topics” feature, and said he will invite “leading conservatives” to meet personally with him about the controversy.
“I want to have a direct conversation about what Facebook stands for, and how we can be sure our platform stays as open as possible,” he wrote.
The announcement was greeted by skepticism by many right-leaning groups.
Liberal Mark Zuckerberg says there's no liberal bias at liberal Facebook. But he'll have liberals look into it.
— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) May 13, 2016
Most Zuckerberg observers, however, were more preoccupied by a photo he also posted Thursday evening of himself with Selena Gomez, whose political views are unknown.
EARLIER: Documents freshly leaked to the Guardian (possibly by Facebook itself) give an inside look at how human intervention plays a crucial role in Facebook’s highly influential “trending topics” section.
Facebook, under fire from Congress and others for liberal bias, has recently insisted publicly that much of its trending decision making is made by computer algorithms. These documents however show the large role of the human editorial team.
MORE: University ‘Bias Team’ Deployed – to Fight Bikinis
Most notable is how Facebook editors decide the importance level of stories. They rely on a list of ten sources that skew decidedly to the left, especially the BBC and the Guardian. Other left-leaning media outlets on the list include the New York Times and NBC News (which oversees unabashedly liberal outlet MSNBC). Fox News is the list’s outlier.
The documents also show how Facebook employees are taught to “inject” topics into the trending list and blacklist others that do not relate to real world events. Employees can inject a newsworthy topic if users create something related that attracts a lot of attention.
These injections contradict statements made by Facebook’s VP of search Tom Stocky who said, “We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so.”
The Daily Caller reported this week that Stocky and his wife have maxed out in personal donations to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and that he’s posted on social media that the goal behind the Paris attacks was to encourage persecution of Muslims by Westerners. He also wrote on social media that terrorists who kill people actually aren’t Muslims.
