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The Hill
Facebook
scrambles to contain fallout
By David McCabe
Facebook is scrambling to contain the fallout from allegations that it
has suppressed right-leaning political content on its powerful platform
— a charge that hits at the social network’s image of neutrality.
CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg promised Thursday to meet with top
conservatives about the allegations, a sign of how damaging any
perception of political bias could be to the company.
“To serve our diverse community, we are committed to building a
platform for all ideas,” Zuckerberg said in post addressing the issue
directly for the first time.
“In the coming weeks, I'll also be inviting leading conservatives and
people from across the political spectrum to talk with me about this
and share their points of view.”
Facebook’s problems intensified when unnamed former workers for its
"trending" topics section told tech news website Gizmodo this week that
colleagues had routinely omitted topics and news sources popular with
conservatives.
This came after a separate report that said Facebook employees had
raised internal questions about whether the company should be doing
anything to stop the rise of presumptive GOP presidential nominee
Donald Trump. Zuckerberg had also appeared to criticize Trump's
hard-line stance on immigration at a conference in April.
Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee,
has demanded answers about whether Facebook employees have manipulated
the presentation of political content.
The controversy is a crisis for a company that portrays itself as a
neutral platform for political debate.
“The reason I care so much about this is that it gets to the core of
everything Facebook is and everything I want it to be,” Zuckerberg said
in his statement.
The "trending" title itself suggests that users coming to Facebook are
seeing news stories and subjects currently popular with other users,
not that they are picked by people with inherent biases.
“To the extent that they position themselves as an impartial player at
that infrastructural level with candidates and voters, any allegation
of bias is explosive and, I think, undermines a lot of the ways that
they’ve been positioning themselves more generally,” said David Kreiss,
an assistant professor at the School of Media and Journalism at the
University of North Carolina.
The allegations also threaten Facebook’s bottom line.
“You don’t want to alienate half your customers, and if you were to
declare an allegiance independent of the reader to whom you are
supposed to be tailoring a feed, I think that could really hurt your
business,” said Jonathan Zittrain, faculty director of the Berkman
Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Facebook has worked hard to do damage control, releasing documents and
information about how trending topics are selected, an uncommon act of
openness for a company that holds its cards close to the vest.
The company has committed to briefing the House Energy and Commerce
Committee, according to an aide to the panel. The company said that it
was looking “forward to addressing” questions posed by Thune.
Facebook has acknowledged that "curators" work on the trending topics
team with a set of guidelines to determine what people see, but it
argues politics does not play a role.
“The guidelines demonstrate that we have a series of checks and
balances in place to help surface the most important popular stories,
regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum,” Justin
Osofsky, the company’s vice president of global operations, said in a
statement. "Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to
systematically discriminate against sources of any political origin,
period.”
A story in the Guardian showed how human editors process a list of
popular topics generated by an algorithm. Conservative websites
Breitbart, RedState and the Drudge Report were on a list of RSS feeds
purportedly used by Facebook’s system, according to a list released by
Facebook.
Some Republicans say they don’t expect an epic fight on Capitol Hill
over the issue.
A senior House aide said Republican lawmakers there were likely to have
a measured response. Many have opposed regulations forcing broadcasters
to offer contrasting points of view, and some conservatives see echoes
of that debate in the Facebook controversy.
A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee, which blasted
Facebook for its alleged behavior, did not respond to an email asking
if the company had reached out to the party.
Read this and other articles at The Hill
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