Social networking giant Facebook, Inc. is to begin training employees about political bias following accusations made in May that it was removing links to conservative content in its trending news section.

Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg made the announcement last week at an event at the American Enterprise institute, noting that it was important that employees respected differing viewpoints.

“We have a managing bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create. And we focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we’re going to add in a scenario now on political bias,” Sandberg is reported to have said. “So as we think about helping people understand different points of view and being open to different points of view, we’re dealing with political bias as well going forward.”

What the political bias training will involve was not made clear; Facebook’s existing program for managing unconscious bias note that the company believes “that understanding and managing unconscious bias can help us build stronger, more diverse and inclusive organizations.”

“Research shows that individuals and organizations that believe they are meritocratic often have the poorest outcomes. That’s because when biases aren’t acknowledged, we can’t deal with them,” the site further notes.

Strange

While Facebook’s commitment to teaching staff to play nicely with people they do not agree with should be welcomed, their decision to implement political bias training is more than a little strange given that they vehemently denied manipulating results in the first place.

The only logical explanation for the move is an effort by the company to placate conservative voters and leaders who remain suspicious of Facebook’s motives .

As Vator News explains it:

Beyond the optics of being accused of political Facebook has its financial health to think about. it has developed relationships with numerous media companies to help distribute content. It needs to reassure conservative news organizations, which are some of the most powerful in the country, that they have nothing to worry about when it comes to their views and articles being somehow suppressed.

In reality very little will actually change; despite it protests Facebook as a company that regularly sensors views it does not agree with on the basis of “safety” and other such politically correct terms used by social justice warriors in the fight against free speech.

Image credit: Brian Solis/ Wikimedia Commons/CC by 2.0