Facebook Claim They May Change Trending Topics At Conservative Request

The Guardian

Earlier this month, a Gizmodo report appeared claiming that the Trending Topic review staff on Facebook were told to wait for stories to appear on mainstream news sites and ignore the conservative news sites. At the time, Facebook claimed that there are guidelines in place to prevent that but since then it's been proven otherwise. Now Facebook has realised that they need to change that.

When you look further into this, you can find that Facebook had a list of 1000 media outlets and websites that they use to gather their information. This list does contain some conservative news sources such as RedState and The Daily Caller, but they're the few conservative sources among the many liberal ones. What makes it worse is the fact they do have these sources, but they trust only ten of them as having the editorial authority and all of those are liberal. When you're sharing the news with the world then you shouldn't have a political bias. You should be willing to share all the facts and debunk all of the lies no matter the viewpoint. The only thing they need not share from any political viewpoint is pointless abuse or hate which they wouldn't do anyway. Facebook should have admitted that they had been doing something wrong earlier but now they're doing something at least.

Mark Zuckerberg met up with a few influential conservatives recently to try to sort the issue out. A few of the Conservatives have come out of this meeting pleased and Facebook is saying that they may try and revamp their Trending Topics guidelines. Rob Bluey, the editor of The Daily Signal - one of the news sources not actually featured on Facebook's source list - was one of the people who got a chance to talk to Zuckerberg. He told them how much The Daily Signal actually relies on Facebook and he heard them say that they would think about revamping the topics. He was someone who left the meeting happy that Facebook would actually try to fix this. In a way, this seems to be the opposite of how Twitter have been dealing with the upset conservative users.

What it comes down to is the fact Facebook aren't trying to push conservatives out or upset them. They made a mistake and shouldn't have denied it but they are trying to fix it. A lot of Facebook's former editors still feel that they weren't exactly doing what Gizmodo claimed so it is hard to work out how to fix this but they do need more balance. Fortunately, Facebook is not a company who are going to risk upsetting so many users so they will most probably make some changes in the near future.

Rosina Brooker

Rosina is a Songbird writer with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is glad to be playing around with apps and writing about them in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina

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