Leaked Documents Confirm Facebook Deciding Which News Stories Trend

by ALLUM BOKHARI
Breitbart
May. 13, 2016

Mere days after Tom Stocky, Facebook's Trending News manager, rejected reports that his subordinates "artificially inject" items into its list of trending news stories, a leak of internal guidelines published in The Guardian show that the company does exactly that. The document shows that Facebook's team behaves like a typical Old Media outlet, with editors selecting and approving stories at virtually every stage of the process. The company also keeps a list of 1,000 "trusted" outlets that it uses in its Trending News feature.

The document also instructs staffers to check if a story is headlining on mainstream outlets like CNN, BBC, Fox News, and The New York Times before assigning it "national-level" importance. This is in stark contrast to the company's outward claim that its Trending News feature merely reflects what's currently trending among its userbase.

Moreover, editors are given the power to insert new topics into the trending list, provided they pass a particular threshold of popularity. This specifically contradicts a claim by Tom Stocky, the company's manager of Trending News, who earlier this week said "we do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so."

This follows a week of damaging reports from anonymous sources at the company, who told Gizmodo that members of Facebook's Trending News feature, which is intended to reflect only the most popular news topics being discussed on Facebook, routinely discriminated against conservative news sources. 

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