
Facebook will train leaders and employees how to check their personal/political views.
by Bravetta Hassell
June 28, 2016
Several former Facebook news curators this spring told Gizmodo they regularly downplayed conservative news stories on the platform’s trending news section despite the fact that such articles were trending on their own among the site’s more than 100 billion users. In response, Facebook announced it will train employees how to spot their own political biases, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“It is a political time and we’re proud of the role we play in elections, not just here but around the world,” Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said last week during a discussion at the American Enterprise Institute, the Journal reported. “The vision of Facebook was to enable individuals to connect, but to connect not just to their friends and family, but also to the people who are representing them and who they want to represent them.”
Facebook announced it would conduct an internal review of the trending topics tool and announced in May the probe had revealed “no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories” displayed in the feature, which Sandberg told Brooks again on Wednesday.
Sandberg also said there is concern that companies in the Silicon Valley have a liberal bias, but explained that human oversight was needed to regulate the trending topics tools otherwise “every day at noon, lunch would be trending.” But to minimize risks related to human judgment the platform will update/clarify its guidelines, and in addition to requiring employees to take a class on managing personal/political biases, the platform will give additional training to reviewers in charge of the trending feature, reminding them that “content decisions may not be made on the basis of politics or ideology.”
Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. Comment below or email editor@clomedia.com.