The issues around Facebook trending topics matter. A lot.
Mark Zuckerberg has met high profile American conservative media figures this week, after being forced to answer allegations made in a Gizmodo article that Facebook edits out conservative news from its influential trending topics box.
This matters a huge amount. Facebook is an exceptionally powerful tool for news publishers, driving large amounts of traffic to them, and both publishers and readers need to understand how and why certain content is promoted. If Facebook, which presents itself simply as an open platform, does take up an editorial line, users/readers should surely be made aware of what that is in the same way we know what perspective newspapers come from.
There is nothing wrong in principle with a website or network only sharing content with a certain political outlook. Drudge obviously does, driving large numbers of eyeballs to conservative news stories, and editorialising many headlines to have a right-wing slant. The Huffington Post comes from the opposite perspective.
Of course Facebook, as a company owned by shareholders not the state, is well within its rights to decide it has a left-leaning news bent, and that those are the types of publications and stories it is going to promote. The problem is that it has always positioned itself as an open-platform, not a news curator with an editorial agenda — that’s why so many different voices have found it such a powerful place to share content.
Furthermore, the allegation is not that there is a deliberate editorial line, but that any bias is far more unconscious — that the left-leaning viewpoint of the majority of staff is seeping into their work. Again, this is a problem if users, most of whom will not spend much time thinking about this type of thing at all, just assume that trending topics is automatically generated. A topic being popular on a social network often makes it seem important.
The original Gizmodo whistleblower notes there was a collection of trusted outlets whose stories were used in trending topics. It is absolutely not a bad thing to send your users first to well respected news outlets, but again it has to be clear that this is what is happening.
Twitter is trying to combat these issues with its algorithmically driven trending topics working alongside the human curated “moments” product. I suspect we will see changes from Facebook in the coming weeks and months too.
Interestingly, talk show titan Glenn Beck, who attended the meeting with Mark Zuckerburg, Sheryl Sandeberg and others, wrote a piece full of praise for Facebook and hitting out at his fellow conservatives. In it he said:
In my opinion, there is no evidence of a top-down initiative to silence conservative voices.
It should be noted that other attendees were less than impressed by Beck’s performance. Daily Caller editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson said:
I went to that meeting expecting Beck to cry, rend his garments while quoting James Madison, but that’s not at all what happened. He began the most extended assiduous suck-up I think I’ve ever seen a grown man commit.
Either way Facebook’s power as a distributor of news will not be diminishing anytime soon, so well done to the company for trying to make some progress in making sure that all stories are equally, and that some are not treated more equally than others.
Update: Wording change to reflect that Facebook is floated on the stock exchange.
