Facebook Data Firms Are Being Awfully Quiet On The 'Trending Topics' Story

Just when you need Big Data, it's nowhere to be found. After Facebook made headlines this week for allegedly meddling with its Trending Topics section, several analytics firms that have provided International Business Times with social media data in the past declined to provide numbers related to the ruckus. The kerfuffle was kicked off by a Gizmodo report alleging the company's Trending Topics section suppresses conservative topics of interest, thanks to the whims of its curators. Within hours of the news, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce wrote a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking representatives of Facebook to travel to Washington for a briefing on its curation guidelines. And Thursday, Facebook released its full guidelines for news selection, showing the extent to which human judgment is part of the process.