Facebook is starting a "managing-bias class" that will be mandatory for all employees after attacks that workers regularly blocked conservative news websites from its "Trending Topics" section.
"We think a lot about diversity at Facebook," Sheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, said Wednesday at an event sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in Washington,
The Hill reports.
"We have a managing-bias class that all of our leaders and a lot of our employees have taken that I was part of helping to create, and we've focused on racial bias, age bias, gender bias, national bias, and we're going to add in a scenario now on political bias.
"So that, as part of [how] we think about helping people understand different points of view and being open to different points of view, we're dealing with political bias as well going forward," Sandberg said.
A Facebook representative told The Hill that the class was mandatory.
The social media platform came under heavy fire last month amid reports that employees regularly
blacklisted stories from Newsmax, Breitbart and other top conservative news websites from the trending news section.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg later met with 17 top conservatives in a session that was widely slammed as focusing more on generating good publicity than squarely addressing the issue.
In fact,
Zuckerberg was criticized this week by Justin Danhof of the National Center for Public Policy Research for sitting "mute" when asked about the issue at the company's annual shareholders meeting on Monday.
Danhof, whose center is a leading conservative think tank, derided the session as an "amateur hour" ruled by "chaos and disorganization."
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