Facebook, the world largest social media platform undoubtedly wields a lot of influence in shaping mindsets.
The tech giant has been under fire for suppressing conservative trends, the allegations which it now openly denies. Facebook “have found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true,” said Tom Stocky, VP Search, Facebook in a blog post.
The clarification came after a report at Gizmodo, which said that Facebook routinely suppressed news stories, which are of interest to conservative readers from the network’s influential “trending” section.
Stocky said, “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.”
As per Gizmodo report, former Facebook “news curators” told that they were instructed to “inject” certain stories in order to make them appear as trending news, on the platform’s homepage and search results, even if they weren’t that popular.
Facebook Trending Topics are designed to showcase the ongoing conversation that happens on the network. It added that popular topics are first surfaced by an algorithm, which is then audited by review team members to check whether the topics are in fact trending news in the real world or not, informed Facebook.
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