Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s guidelines did not “permit the prioritization of one viewpoint over another or the suppression of political perspectives”, in response to a Gizmodo report report that the company ‘suppressed conservative news’ in its Trending Topics panel on Facebook. (Noam Chomsky, anyone?) In his post, Zuckerberg added that Facebook was “conducting a full investigation to ensure our teams upheld the integrity of this product.” He said that Facebook did not find any evidence of the allegations against it in the Gizmodo report, but if it did find anything, Facebook would “take additional steps to address it,” without stating what steps it would take. Trending Topics’ editorial team follows editorial guidelines Yesterday, The Guardian published leaked documents from Facebook, citing the Trending Topics guidelines. The guidelines don’t say anything about suppressing any kind of content, but indeed follow any typical newsroom’s approach which has in house styles and editorial guidelines. If there were an error, one could attribute it either to man (the editorial team) or the machine (the algorithm used to detect trending topics). Also read: Why we joined Facebook’s Instant Articles & Left – Amit Bhawani, Phone Radar News sources liberal, some employees conservative It would be pretty tough for Facebook to ascertain which single editor or group of editors influenced whether or not to suppress conservative content, but I imagine that’s the full investigation Zuckerberg is talking about. The Guardian states that Facebook’s critics would argue that Facebook’s news sources were liberal. It should be…
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