Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied Thursday that the social network’s editors suppress conservative news from its trending topics list.
(FOX)- In a Facebook post, Zuckerberg said he planned to talk with leading conservatives in coming weeks “about what Facebook stands for and how we can be sure our platform stays as open as possible.”
However, the 31-year-old also said there was “no evidence” to support the suppression claim, which was made by unidentified former Facebook contractors to the tech blog Gizmodo earlier this week.
“If we find anything against our principles, you have my commitment that we will take additional steps to address it,” Zuckerberg wrote.
Earlier Thursday, the company’s Vice President of Global Operations, Justin Osofsky, published a blog post saying the company followed guidelines to ensure that stories in trending topics represent “the most important popular stories, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum.”
“The guidelines do not permit reviewers to add or suppress political perspectives,” Osofsky said in a statement.
The blog post linked to a 28-page internal document Facebook uses to determine trending topics, after the Guardian published a similar document that was leaked to it.
Facebook hasn’t said how many people are responsible for the trending topics team. The Guardian reported the team was as few as 12 people, citing leaked documents, but Facebook didn’t comment on that number.