A former Facebook employee has said that ‘curators’ at the social network routinely tried to keep conservative content or news that didn’t fit their personal biases out of the site’s “trending” tool, Gizmodo reports. Facebook continues to deny the claims.
Facebook’s Vice President of Search, Tom Stocky, responded to the claims, saying: “We take these reports extremely seriously, and have found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true.”
The allegations, which were made by an anonymous source who worked as a contractor for the site, claim that workers or “curators” for Facebook’s trending tool frequently “injected” headlines into the trending tool for items that weren’t actually trending among Facebook’s users. Meanwhile, headlines for conservative topics that were trending were often ignored, Gizmodo reports.
“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” the source told Gizmodo. This is a big issue for publishers and the public alike—especially during an election season.
“As the No. 1 driver of audience to news sites, Facebook has become the biggest force in the marketplace of ideas. With that influence comes a significant responsibility,” CNN Money reports Poynter ethicist Kelly McBride wrote in a blog post.
In one prominent example of manipulating the tool, the source claimed that workers were told to artificially “inject” #BlackLivesMatter into the trending bar. This would be especially significant given how important social media was to the rise of the movement. According to Stocky, however, “We looked into that charge and found that it is untrue. We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so.”
In a long list of other things workers were apparently asked to do, including avoiding publishing Facebook itself as a topic in the trending bar, employees were chastised if Facebook’s trending tool didn’t include things that were trending on Twitter, and were told to “inject” breaking news into the tool, such as the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks. This was apparently to make it seem as though Facebook could compete with Twitter as a source for the latest news.
The news of these allegations is raising ethical questions of Facebook’s responsibility to the public. Gizmodo argued that while editing the tool to reflect certain topics of interest “is by no means a bad thing” (stating this is how a newsroom typically operates), it does go against the idea that Facebook’s trending topics are examples of what real Facebook users are discussing in real time. And it doesn’t do much to separate Facebook from all the other media that already exists. While all of Gizmodo’s sources were anonymous, Facebook hasn’t provided a totally transparent explanation of how their processes work—so it’s hard to know what to believe.