Former Facebook Employees Admit Manipulating ‘Trending’ Topics

Facebook is used by a lot of people every single day so to have a story appear in its Trending Topics list can bring a website a considerable amount of traffic. “These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics”.

It’s clear news is a priority: the company has rolled out a range of tools created to make news consumption on Facebook even easier, including Instant Articles, Live Video, and Save for Later, and an updated newsfeed algorithm that prioritises the quality of articles and length of time spent reading them.

A study by researchers affiliated with Facebook previous year found that the site’s algorithm had a relatively small level of influence on how much “cross cutting material” – or incoming news that represented the views of a users’ friends with opposing politics.

Depending on who was on duty, said the unnamed conservative ex-curator, citing fear of retribution from the company, “things would be blacklisted or trending …”

Beyond red versus blue, curators were trained to “inject” select stories into the trending module even when they weren’t trending, according to sources quoted by Gizmodo.

Facebook launched the Trending section in 2014 to compete with the real-time trending news delivery of their social media competitor, Twitter.

This is the latest in the story of Facebook’s politically biased “trending” section, which we initially reported on last week.

Examples of news stories that were put into the news feed despite not having trending status were reports about the Charlie Hebdo attacks and certain Black Lives Matter stories, according to the information provided to Gizmodo. They can still search for their favorite conservative (or liberal) news source on Facebook and share links that’ll get that blood boiling and those fingers typing.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote that “The great irony … is that Gizmodo’s story therefore likely won’t end up on Facebook’s list of trending topics”.

A former employee told Gizmodo that when he or she would log on, they noticed popular conservative topics were left off the homepage list. If there is a cooking of the digital books that penalizes conservatives, Facebook could face a considerable backlash.

Troubled by what was perceived as an anti-conservative bias, the former curator kept a running list of trending conservative topics that were omitted from the sidebar and provided that list to Gizmodo. ‘They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it”, said one former curator.

That’s what some unnamed former Facebook contractors told the tech site Gizmodo-and it’s an accusation that strikes at the heart of the social network’s credibility.