Did Facebook bury conservative news? Ex-staffers say yes.

The great irony of the tech blog Gizmodo's revelation that Facebook's trending-topic curators weeded out stories about Facebook or about issues popular with conservatives is that Gizmodo's story therefore likely won't end up on Facebook's list of trending topics. After all, the report, which suggests that the social media behemoth's team filtered out stories on conservative topics from conservative sites, will most certainly be very, very popular with conservatives. (Update: Or maybe it will.)

What we're talking about here is that little box in the upper right of your Facebook page — the short list of news topics that are being discussed on Facebook at the moment. They're clearly tailored to the user; as I write, mine include stories about New York (where I live) and politics, which I would assume that a surgeon in Dallas probably wouldn't see. Because Facebook has one-sixth of the world using it every day, pretty much everything is being talked about to some extent. The company uses an automatic system (an algorithm) to surface what's currently popular, and a team of staffers then further curates the list to tailor it to meet particular standards.