Facebook Clarifies How Trending Topics Work: We Do Not Discriminate

Facebook has published a blog post outlining the methodology it uses to curate its Trending Topics, claiming the company does not discriminate based on ideology, but does rely on the judgment of its employees in addition to an algorithm.

The post, written by Facebook VP of Global Operations Justin Osofsky, comes the same day that an article was published in The Guardian, which lent credence to criticisms that Facebook deliberately curates its Trending Topics feed to ignore conservative viewpoints.

The article is based on leaked guidelines the company gave to employees who sort potential stories, and seems to back up some of the claims made in articles appearing in Gizmodo.

At particular issue were the use of the words “inject” and “blacklist” to describe the process the Trending Topics reviewers use to determine what goes in the feed, notions which Osofsky’s post seems calibrated to address:

Q. Have reviewers been instructed by Facebook to inject specific stories into Trending Topics to suppress conservative news/sites? 

No — and the guidelines do not permit reviewers to add or suppress political perspectives.

Responding to the criticism that Facebook “injects” certain stories into users’ feeds, the post clarifies that “inject” refers to adding a tag to a story to more accurately categorize it.

If, in this process, a topic is detected that should connect to a linguistically-similar but distinct topic (e.g., the LEGO movie vs LEGO the toy), the reviewer may replace the topic ID by “injecting” a more accurate topic ID.

As to the claim of “blacklisting,” Osofsky writes that the “guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives,” and that the exclusion of certain topics pertains strictrly to filtering out “noise.” about 40% of the topics in the queue get rejected by the reviewers because they reflect what is considered “’noise’ — a random word or name that lots of people are using in lots of different ways.”

For example, braised, DVD, #weekend and #sale are all topics that were not accepted as trends over the past week. This tool is not used to suppress or remove articles or topics from a particular perspective.

The post concludes by asserting that the company takes “these reports very seriously, and will continue to investigate the allegations. We have found no evidence to date that Trending Topics was successfully manipulated, but will continue the review of all our practices.”

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Sam Reisman (@thericeman) is a staff editor at Mediaite.