After a recent report by Gizmodo, filled with a string of stirring allegations that Facebook “routinely suppressed news stories” that weren’t mainstream, or too hard-line, Facebook has come out and denied the charge, stating that it is entirely neutral concerning politics. This is not the first time Facebook’s neutrality, or lack thereof, has come into question. Cast your mind back a few years ago when Facebook was allegedly swaying voters opinions by manipulating its algorithms. The recent news is hardly much different.

According to one former contracted employee of the social media giant, “Workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.”

The people that chose what appeared in the news feeds were (are), according to the report, called “news curators”. These people were apparently told to choose certain stories to be included in the feeds even if they were not trending stories, and also not include other stories even if they were trending– some of which, the report said, were negative stories about Facebook itself.

If the allegations are true, Facebook’s claim that it is neutral and merely gives you what is trending – unlike the highly or sufficiently biased mainstream news media we are used to – is dubious. At the same time it provokes a lot of questions about a platform that wants to become your go-to news source.

Facebook said in a statement that it is taking these allegations very seriously. Part of that statement read:

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.

In spite of this, the contractor told Gizmodo that each work shift certain stories would be good-to-go, or blacklisted. He had made a log of these stories and had showed this log to Gizmodo. Other curators interviewed by the tech media company denied that Facebook had political bias or exhorted employees to work with such bias.

Reading the full account one revelation does stand true; Facebook would now be hard-pushed to claim political neutrality. Other employees, however, working as curators admitted to shoehorning news into feeds, but not all admitted that it was because of political bias – mainly they said it was due to a ‘big’ story not trending fast enough.

Facebook’s  vice president of search, Tom Stocky, recently responded to the allegations:

My team is responsible for Trending Topics, and I want to address today’s reports alleging that Facebook contractors manipulated Trending Topics to suppress stories of interest to conservatives. We take these reports extremely seriously, and have found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true.

Facebook is a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum. 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.

Trending Topics is designed to showcase the current conversation happening on Facebook. Popular topics are first surfaced by an algorithm, then audited by review team members to confirm that the topics are in fact trending news in the real world and not, for example, similar-sounding topics or misnomers.

We are proud that, in 2015, the US election was the most talked-about subject on Facebook, and we want to encourage that robust political discussion from all sides. We have in place strict guidelines for our trending topic reviewers as they audit topics surfaced algorithmically: reviewers are required to accept topics that reflect real world events, and are instructed to disregard junk or duplicate topics, hoaxes, or subjects with insufficient sources. Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to systematically discriminate against sources of any ideological origin and we’ve designed our tools to make that technically not feasible. At the same time, our reviewers’ actions are logged and reviewed, and violating our guidelines is a fireable offense.

There have been other anonymous allegations — for instance that we artificially forced ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter to trend. 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. Our guidelines do permit reviewers to take steps to make topics more coherent, such as combining related topics into a single event (such as ‪#‎starwars and ‪#‎maythefourthbewithyou), to deliver a more integrated experience.

Our review guidelines for Trending Topics are under constant review, and we will continue to look for improvements. We will also keep looking into any questions about Trending Topics to ensure that people are matched with the stories that are predicted to be the most interesting to them, and to be sure that our methods are as neutral and effective as possible.

Photo credit: Dani Mettler via Flickr