Curators of the social media company’s ‘trending news’ sidebar purposely leave out stories from rightwing sites, a former employee has alleged 
 
 Facebook’s trending bar deliberately suppresses conservative news, according to a new report. 
 
 Facebook, now arguably the most important distributor of news online, has cultivated the idea that its bar is an impartial algorithm that responds to “likes” and gives users only what they’ve indicated they want. 
 
 But in a bombshell confession on the tech blog Gizmodo, a former editor says popular conservative news would be kept off the “trending news” sidebar. 
 
 
 
 “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz,” the former news curator told Gizmodo. 
 
 
 
 The news started a firestorm in conservative media circles. The Drudge Report ran the piece in its top slot with a picture of Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and the headline: “Not Leaning In ... Leaning Left!” a reference to her bestselling book, Lean In. 
 
 Breitbart News editor in chief Alex Marlow said the report confirmed “what conservatives have long suspected: Facebook’s trending news artificially mutes conservatives and amplifies progressives. 
 
 “Facebook claims its algorithm simply populates ‘topics that have recently become popular on Facebook’ in its trending news section, but now we know that’s not true.” 
 
 Paul Bedard, DC reporter for the Washington Examiner, accused the social media network of “censoring conservatives”. 
 
 
 
 Paul Bedard (@SecretsBedard) Facebook is No. 1 driver of mobile readers to news sites. Impact obvious in censoring conservatives. https://t.co/hWm68stLwa via @DCExaminer 
 
 Hugo Gurdon, the Washington Examiner’s editorial director, said: “We’ve read the report, and it is obviously of considerable interest to us. We plan on working with Facebook to ensure Washington Examiner’s valuable content gets the attention it obviously deserves.” 
 
 Leon Wolf, an author at Redstate, one of the publications listed by the Gizmodo interviewees as having been targeted for exclusion, said he had not seen evidence of the kind of tampering mentioned by Gizmodo. “I watch our Facebook stats very closely,” Wolf told the Guardian. 
 
 “The troubling thing about this is that Facebook is such a huge deal,” Wolf said. “They can make or break success in a way that nobody else can. There’s a lot of scrutiny that people have on CNN, they’re several orders of magnitude less influential than Facebook is.” 
 
 
 
 The rise of Facebook as a dominant player in news has already worried some media watchers who are concerned the social network could become too powerful and set the news agenda and potentially block news that might not fit its corporate agenda. 
 
 Emily Bell, director of the Tow centre for digital journalism at Columbia journalism school, said on Twitter that she questioned whether algorithms could ever be impartial. 
 
 
 
 emily bell (@emilybell) @dominicru @attackerman @ShaunKing as I like to bore my students/the general public with...algorithms are never neutral. Ever. 
 
 But Gizmodo’s report was challenged by one ex-Facebooker who took issue with its characterization in an interview with the Guardian, saying that newsworthiness was determined by how often a story appeared on a list of trusted news outlets including this publication, the New York Times and the BBC. If five of the 10 put a story on the front page, it could be made to appear more often on Facebook Paper; if 10 put the story on the front page, it was added to the “trending” bar. 
 
 
 
 Beyond the list of 10 internationally trusted publications was another list of a thousand news sources that showed the editors where stories were trending; that list was more fungible and could be added to or subtracted from. 
 
 
 
 The former news curator interviewed by the Guardian hadn’t seen evidence that conservative stories were being blacklisted. “I was only there for four or five months, but I didn’t see that happening,” the person said. The employee added, however that the job was to identify pertinent news stories based on a strict set of criteria. “But also whenever we started a shift you’d go through stories that had been greenlit, and you had to prove yourself to be consistent enough to be a competent editor.” 
 
 
 
 The former contractor maintained that the unit had enough power to push back when others in the company asked for a story to be removed. “The one time when we had intervention on a story we did was when Sheryl Sandberg’s husband died,” the ex-employee said. “We reported it as a news story – ‘COO’s husband died in location X.’ A whole bunch of people said, ‘We shouldn’t report on that story,’ and we said, ‘Well, it’s news, so we’re covering it.’ We kept it up and we never got any flack from Sheryl or anyone else.” 
 
 
 
 The feeds, the ex-employee said, were pure popularity among Facebook users, but popularity as determined by human curators: “Beyoncé trends most days, but that’s just because people are posting pictures of Beyoncé.” ||||| As Facebook battles a report accusing it of suppressing conservative news, CEO says he plans to ‘invite leading conservatives ... to share their point of view’ 
 
 Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that he plans to invite “leading conservatives and people from across the political spectrum” to talk with him about accusations of political bias at the social media company. 
 
 Zuckerberg made the announcement Thursday evening in a Facebook post that continued to deny the allegations of bias and the claim that the Facebook trending topics team suppresses conservative news. 
 
 “We have found no evidence that this report is true,” he wrote. “If we find anything against our principles, you have my commitment that we will take additional steps to address it.” 
 
 Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show Read more 
 
 On Monday, Gizmodo reported that contracted workers at Facebook “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers” and artificially “inject” stories into the trending topics section, citing anonymous former “news curators”. 
 
 Zuckerberg’s statement is a sign of how damaging the allegations are to a company that, despite serving as a news source for millions of people, maintains that it is a neutral tech company. 
 
 On Tuesday, Facebook’s vice-president for search, Tom Stocky, addressed the controversy in a post of his own, denying allegations of bias and writing: “We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so.” 
 
 But early on Thursday, the Guardian obtained Facebook’s internal guidelines for the trending topics section that contradicted Stocky’s statement. The documents include instructions for how curators can “inject” or “blacklist” topics in the trending topics. 
 
 “The editorial team CAN [sic] inject a newsworthy topic in the event that something is attracting a lot of attention, such as #BlackLivesMatter,” the guidelines state. 
 
 Facebook’s vice-president for global operations, Justin Osofsky, subsequently wrote his own blogpost about the editorial guidelines – which were released – and specified that many topics are rejected because they “reflect what is considered ‘noise’”. 
 
 The inside story of Facebook’s biggest setback | Rahul Bhatia Read more 
 
 Zuckerberg’s statement – the third dispatch from a company executive in just four days – did not address the question of Facebook’s editorial practices, but instead focused on the question of political bias against conservative viewpoints. 
 
 Conservative media have doubled down on those accusations of bias against Facebook in the wake of revelations by the Guardian on the company’s news strategy. 
 
 “They market it as this organic collection of things that are trending,” said Sean Davis, co-founder of popular conservative site the Federalist. 
 
 “They are walling off huge areas people are talking about. That’s the real problem. We’re generally for free association, for private enterprise. If their investors like it, we’re free to criticize it and they’re free to do what they want. The beef from conservatives has not been that there’s bias, it’s been that there’s not admission of it.” 
 
 Facebook relies on a list of 10 top news sources, including the Guardian, for most of its decisions about whether a subject meets the criteria to join its trending news module. Below that is a list of other sources that can be used that totals 1,000. The Federalist is not on the list. 
 
 The presence, or absence, of a publication from the Facebook list became an immediate source of contention throughout the media world, irrespective of political alignment: 
 
 Adrianne Jeffries (@adrjeffries) i'm so salty about motherboard not being on this goddamn facebook list 
 
 The conservative media was also incensed by Stocky, whose electoral contributions – including a $2,700 maximum donation to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign – were immediately published by conservative outlets the Federalist and Breitbart. 
 
 In addition, US senator John Thune, a Republican party leader and chairman of the Senate commerce committee, demanded on Tuesday that Facebook respond to the allegations of bias. 
 
 Steven Crowder, a syndicated right-wing talk show host with more than 1.1m followers on Facebook, has said he is pursuing legal action in the wake of Gizmodo’s revelations. 
 
 But some media experts were pleased to hear that Facebook was not relying solely on algorithms for its news gathering. 
 
 Michael Shapiro, a professor at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, said: “Call me old-fashioned but I’m always infinitely happier when a human being is making a decision. 
 
 “Editors are people, have things that they love and things they’d never want to read but one thing an editor can do that no algorithm can do is factor for surprise. An algorithm is based on discerning patterns, and one thing I can say as a publisher is that I’m forever struck by how a story with no earthly reason to capture a wide audience will just take off.” 
 
 One thing non-Facebook newspeople are now suggesting is that Facebook release its news curators from the nondisclosure agreements that have kept its operation shrouded in secrecy. BuzzFeed on Thursday quoted ex-employees characterizing those agreements as unusually harsh. “I don’t think I’ve ever signed an NDA like that,” one told the site. 
 
 Zuckerberg made headlines in April for making a veiled critique of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the company’s annual developer conference. 
 
 Though he never mentioned Trump by name, Zuckerberg’s remarks about “fearful voices talking about building walls” were widely interpreted to be a reference to Trump. 
 
 “Instead of building walls we can help build bridges,” he added. “Instead of dividing people we can connect people. It takes courage to choose hope over fear.” 
 
 On 5 May, Facebook announced that it would sponsor both the Republican and Democratic national conventions this summer, citing the social media platform’s goal of “facilitat[ing] an open dialogue among voters, candidates and elected officials”. 
 
 Zuckerberg struck a similar tone in Thursday afternoon’s post. 
 
 “Every tool we build is designed to give more people a voice and bring our global community together,” he wrote. “For as long as I’m leading this company this will always be our mission.” ||||| Facebook’s Trending News section will be shutting down permanently next week. 
 
 The feature, which sits to the right of the status box in Facebook’s newsfeed, has frequrently been the subject of controversy since it was launched in 2014. An algorithm selects the trending topics based on how many stories have been posted about that topic and how users are interacting with those news items. 
 
 Human employees review the selections, and that has sometimes landed Facebook in hot water. In 2016 former Facebook FB, -0.61% employees told Gizmodo they routinely suppressed conservative news from the “trending” section. Facebook denied the Gizmodo story and the employee in charge of the trending topics section said the company has “found no evidence that the anonymous allegations are true.” As Facebook continued to tweak its algorithm, the trending feature was blamed for surfacing conspiracy theories following high profile news stories like the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. 
 
 Now the social media giant is removing the section completely. In its place it will launch a new section called Today In, which will prioritize news events happening near users as well as news from local publishers in their cities and local officials, Facebook announced in a blog post Friday. It will also be testing a “breaking news” feature — which, through a partnership with 80 publishers in North America, South America, Europe, India and Australia — will allow publications to indicate that a story is breaking news on posts they share. 
 
 Don’t miss: The shocking details you reveal about yourself when you ‘like’ things on Facebook 
 
 “People tell us they want to stay informed about what is happening around them,” Facebook said in a statement on its press page. “We are committed to ensuring the news that people see on Facebook is high quality, and we’re investing in ways to better draw attention to breaking news when it matters most.” 
 
 Facebook did not respond to a request for comment from MarketWatch about whether eliminating the trending section was a response to criticisms about fake news on the site. 
 
 The change comes as Facebook makes a concerted effort to crack down on “fake news,” an issue that came into focus during the 2016 presidential elections. Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said after the elections, the company deployed artificial intelligence tools to identify fake news. It also took down 837 million pieces of spam and disabled 583 million fake accounts in the first quarter of 2018. 
 
 Unreliable information has been a problem across social media platforms: posts on Twitter featuring fake news were 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories, a March 2018 study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found. 
 
 Facebook has also been under fire for what it does with users’ sensitive personal data, an issue that came to the fore when news broke that data company Cambridge Analytica harvested the psychological profiles of Facebook users to attempt to influence their votes in the 2016 presidential election. But the change to Trending News seems to be unrelated, said Mark Weinstein, privacy expert and creator of social media network MeWe. 
 
 “The fundamental issue that doesn’t change with the removal of trending is Facebook’s ability to target their members,” he said. “This change is really engineered so that they can both better target their members with whatever the algorithm deems valuable for the member, and to better glean data from members regarding their thoughts and preferences.”
– A former curator of Facebook's "trending news" feature says employees often deliberately kept conservative news out of the spotlight, reports Gizmodo. “Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” says the anonymous ex-employee. For example, stories about the IRS' Lois Lerner scandal, CPAC, or topics from the Drudge Report or other conservative outlets wouldn't make the cut, even if they were clearly popular online. As a previous Gizmodo story explained, Facebook has a team of young journalists who provide human oversight to the company's news algorithm and help select which headlines qualify as "trending" in the upper right corner of Facebook pages. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the ex-employee says. The Guardian calls it a "bombshell confession," one that has set off a flurry of interest on the right. Drudge, for example, gave the story prominent play alongside a photo of Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg with the headline, "Not Leaning In ... Leaning Left!” And the conservative Washington Examiner, calling Facebook the "King of News" for smartphones, says the practice could have a "huge and negative impact" on conservative media.