![]() ![]() Conservatives would label the majority of Facebook’s primary sources as liberal. ![]() The guidelines are sure to bolster arguments that Facebook has made discriminatory editorial decisions against rightwing media. (The Guardian also obtained the guidelines for moderating the “in the story” feature, now called “involved in this story” the guidelines for the company’s Facebook Paper app and a broader editorial guide for the app.) The company’s guidelines are very similar to a traditional news organization’s, with a style guide reminiscent of the Associated Press guide, a list of trusted sources and instructions for determining newsworthiness. The guidelines give editors ways to determine which users’ pages are appropriate to cite, and how prominently. Strict guidelines are enforced around Facebook’s “ involved in this story” feature, which pulls information from Facebook pages of newsmakers – say, a sports star or a famous author.“We measure this by checking if it is leading at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo.” “You should mark a topic as ‘National Story’ importance if it is among the 1-3 top stories of the day,” reads the trending review guidelines for the US. Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority.The company wrote that “the editorial team CAN inject a newsworthy topic” as well if users create something that attracts a lot of attention, for example #BlackLivesMatter.A team of news editors working in shifts around the clock was instructed on how to “inject” stories into the trending topics module, and how to “blacklist” topics for removal for up to a day over reasons including “doesn’t represent a real-world event”, left to the discretion of the editors.The guidelines show human intervention – and therefore editorial decisions – at almost every stage of Facebook’s trending news operation, a team that at one time was as few as 12 people: The company backed away from a pure-algorithm approach in 2014 after criticism that it had not included enough coverage of unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in users’ feeds. But the documents show that the company relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team to determine what makes its “trending module” headlines – the list of news topics that shows up on the side of the browser window on Facebook’s desktop version.
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