Facebook Denies Suppressing Conservative News: ‘Rigorous Guidelines in Place’

Former Facebook employees claimed in a new report today that they were regularly suppressing conservative news and blacklisting certain topics from trending. One former Facebook curator said, “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”

The report about Facebook ended up trending on Facebook with a link to RedState, a conservative site, which raised some eyebrows online.

But according to TechCrunch, Facebook issued a statement later today vociferously denying any sort of political bias in its trending topics:

We take allegations of bias very seriously. Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook. There are rigorous guidelines in place for the review team to ensure consistency and neutrality. These guidelines do not permit the suppression of political perspectives. Nor do they permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or one news outlet over another. These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.

As of this posting, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan, George W. Bush, and Chris Christie are all trending stories on Facebook.

[image via Shutterstock]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

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