Facebook’s Trending Section Is Now the Business of US Senate Commerce Committee

In response to yesterday’s news that several ex-Facebook news curators had alleged systemic political bias regarding the stories and outlets permitted to receive a plum spot in the social media giant’s Trending news section, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) has written a letter on behalf of the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Communication to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Writing that “Facebook has enormous influence on users’ perceptions of current events, including political perspectives,” Sen. Thune says if Facebook’s claim of using a “neutral, objective algorithm” based on users’ organic sharing of news stories to maintain “a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum” is false, this would constitute “mislead[ing] the public,” which is within the Committee’s oversight authority. 

Facebook issued a statement this morning denying the allegations that it suppressed conservative news and that it “artificially forced ‪#‎BlackLivesMatter‬ to trend.”

A partial list of the questions and data requested by Thune are below:

• Have Facebook news curators in fact manipulated the content of the Trending Topics section, either by targeting news stories related to conservative views for exclusion or by injecting non-trending content?

• What steps is Facebook taking to investigate claims of politically motivated manipulation of news stories in the Trending Topics section? If such claims are substantiated, what steps will Facebook take to hold the responsible individuals accountable?

•  Does Facebook maintain a record of curators’ decisions to inject a story into the Trending Topics section or target a story for removal? If such a record is not maintained, can such decisions be reconstructed or determined based on an analysis of the Trending Topics product?

• If so, how many stories have curators excluded that represented conservative viewpoints or topics of interest to conservatives? How many stories did curators inject that were not, in fact, trending?

•  Please provide a list of all news stories removed from or injected into the Trending Topics section since January 2014.

In the letter to Zuckerberg, Thune requested this information by “no later than May 24,” and also asked for the “employees responsible for Trending Topics” to appear in Washington to brief the Committee.