Facebook Offers Political Bias Training In Wake Of Trending Controversy

Facebook is still reeling from the scandal that erupted last month, when it was accused, by a former contractor, of routinely preventing stories from conservative news outlets from appearing in its “Trending Topics” sidebar due to political bias.

“Facebook plans to add a section on “political bias” to its class on ‘managing bias.’ All Facebook executives and many employees have taken the class which focuses on identifying and neutralising racial, age, gender and other types of bias”, Wall Street Journal quoted Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook, as saying. Facebook now requires all of its top leaders and many of its regular employees to go through a bias training that focuses on race, age, gender, and nationality.

The new political bias module, Sandberg said, will help people understand and be open to different points of view.

Facebook is adding a training program for its employees to address concerns that the company has a bias against conservatives.

Facebook is not a particularly diverse company.

Despite Facebook’s efforts, the company reported abysmal diversity on its staff in 2015. “We are trying to conduct a majority of our business here, and we need the immigration system that lets us do that”. A Facebook spokeswoman said there’s no timeline yet on when the module will launch and did not specify what will be included in it. “And so we took it very seriously and did a thorough investigation, and we didn’t find a liberal bias”. According to a Reuters analysis of campaign finance data, 79 percent of Facebook employee contributions in 2016 have supported Democrats.

Facebook is already used by 1.65 billion people a month – and its user base continues to grow.

“We think a lot about diversity”, she said.

The report led to Facebook investigating the accusations and finding no trace of systematic bias.

When asked about this on Wednesday, Sandberg simply said it isn’t true. “And what you really want is cognitive diversity and intellectual diversity”.

“People are not going to speak truth to power unless you make that apparent”, she said.

More than a dozen media personalities met with Zuckerberg to talk about Facebook’s policies and algorithms, which the company asserts “do not permit the suppression of political perspectives”. “We’re not a media company”, she said.