VIENNA (dpa-AFX) - Social network giant Facebook (FB) has announced changes to the way it runs its trending stories list to avoid political bias despite its internal probe found no evidence that it was happening.
There will be more training for staff and the feed will no longer rely on a list of news organisations to validate subjects. This means it will eliminate the 'Media 1K' list, the list of RSS feeds used to supplement the algorithm that generates potential trending topics, and the top-10 list of news outlets.
The company is also removing the ability to assign an 'importance level' to a topic through assessment of the topic's prominence on the top-10 list of news outlets.
Facebook will expand its Help Center content on Trending Topics to provide more information about this feature and how it works.
The Trending Topics column appears in the top right corner of a typical Facebook page. It is designed to highlight what subjects are being discussed heavily by Facebook users around the world.
The decision comes two weeks after Facebook refuted allegations that its contractors manipulated Trending Topics to suppress stories of interest to conservatives.
Technology news site Gizmodo had reported that Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's influential 'trending' news section.
Facebook insisted that it does not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and does not instruct its reviewers to do so.
But Gizmodo says the 'Trending Topics' section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook's users-167 million in the US alone-are reading at any given moment.
John Thune, Chairman of Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, had sought explanation from Facebook co-founder and CEO Zuckerbergto about these serious allegations.
He urged the social network giant to hold those responsible to account if there has been political bias in the dissemination of trending news.
'Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature,' Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch said in a letter Monday responding to a query from the Republican US Senator.
Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX