Facebook Responds to Senate Commerce Committee

Our Trending Topics feature is a recent innovation designed to connect people to topics that people are talking about on Facebook. This is in addition to (and separate from) an individual’s News Feed, which is the central way that most people discover information and connect with others on Facebook. Suppressing political content or preventing people from seeing what matters most to them is directly contrary to Facebook’s mission and our business objectives. When anonymous allegations of political bias recently surfaced in relation to Facebook’s Trending Topics feature, we immediately launched an investigation to determine if anyone violated the integrity of the feature or acted in ways that are inconsistent with Facebook’s policies and mission.

We spoke with current reviewers and their supervisors, as well as a cross-section of former reviewers; spoke with our contractor; reviewed our guidelines, training, and practices; examined the effectiveness of operational oversight designed to identify and correct mistakes and abuse; and analyzed data on the implementation of our guidelines by reviewers. Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature.