So we already know about how Facebook uses algorithms to only show you things on your news feed that it deems as being "important" to you. Although this is hardly accurate, because there are multiple reasons why you might have been looking up someones profile, or googling information about a particular topic that some girl from high school that you still have on there happens to be posting a lot about lately. But according to an article from Gizmodo, Facebook might be tailoring what appears on the trends as well as what you see in your news feed.
The "Trending Topics" header that appears on everyone's homepage is a feature that came out within the past few years, and is supposedly supposed to show users what topics are coming up frequently among your friends, as well as what users as a collective are talking about. But instead of this section being run by pure algorithm, there are workers hand picking what they think should and shouldn't be shown there.
Aside from making sure that Facebook itself and news about the site stay out of this module, the curators could push topics, or blacklist them at their own discretion. One of the effects of this was a consistent lack of more conservative-based topics ever appearing in the trending section, no matter if lots of people were talking about it or not. This was due to the lack of conservatively-mined people curating the topics.
I might not agree with what news anchors and politicians on the right-hand side of the political spectrum have to say, but I still believe that it is important to put all of the topics of interest that people are talking about out there, without being censored by some third party's bias.
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