Hear from execs at The New York Times, Thomson Reuters, Trusted Media Brands and many others
Facebook is beating back accusations of bias in its trending topics, and while that does concern some in the ad industry, it’s not for the obvious reasons.
Facebook’s editorial staff was accused by anonymous former staffers of suppressing trending topics if they promoted conservative media sources while artificially boosting more liberal stories. Marketers, for their part, are less concerned about any possible political bias than they are about a general lack of transparency at the social network.
“The editorial element is not wrong in itself, but not being transparent about it raises red flags. Facebook would be wise to reveal their editorial team and to actively cultivate diversity within it in order to reduce the cumulative bias that results,” said Liz Caradonna, director of digital strategy at DigitasLBi.
Since, the Gizmodo story came out this week accusing Facebook of controlling its trending topics, the social network has opened up more about the process. Yesterday, it denied any meddling through Tom Stocky, the head of the trending team.
“We looked into that charge and found that it is untrue. We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so,” Stocky wrote in a blog post.
Yet the story still shined a light on the fact that Facebook does partly curate its trending topics — there is a human element beyond the algorithm. Twitter, not Facebook, is considered the go-to place for real-time conversations and live news reaction, and Facebook’s trends do sometimes seem to miss the daily digital pulse.
“It is a sign that the platform isn’t functioning in a way that they would like it to function. It is a big problem if Facebook is completely disconnected from the zeitgeist,” said Joe Liebman, global strategy director at Tribal Worldwide.
Noah Mallin, head of social media at MEC North America, said that Facebook was probably experimenting with trending topics, and could afford to test how different trends play among different audiences on its 1.6 billion-person platform.
“Like Google, they aren’t always forthcoming about why and how they set up what people see I think in large part to prevent attempts to game their systems. The downside is that people sometimes jump to conclusions about why and how they do what they do,” Mallin said.
Still, he doubted the story would have any impact on marketers’ ad strategies.
More in Media
Ahead of GTA 6, Rockstar Games is staffing up its creator platform division with an eye toward UGC creators
Grand Theft Auto’s creator platform continues to evolve, with the company making key hires ahead of the release of “Grand Theft Auto 6.”
The coalition of the willing (and unable): publishers rally to wall off AI’s free ride
That coalition is taking shape in the form of a technical framework designed to let publishers control who can access their content, and under what terms.
Creators are standing up IRL events to soak up more of brands’ marketing dollars
For brands, the ability to measure performance is a key motivator to lean into creators’ IRL events. Across the board, brands are more closely scrutinizing the performance of their creator marketing spend, pushing to experiment with channels that have more easily measurable performance metrics in the form of conversions or foot traffic.