After meeting with conservatives concerned over its alleged suppression of conservative news outlets, Facebook announced it would make changes to how its Trending Topics section curates news.

Though the social media giant found "no evidence" of top-down initiated conservative bias, it couldn't rule out "isolated improper actions" by staff members who actively avoided conservative news sources.

U.S. Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune (R-SD) sent a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking him to explain why reports were suggesting his dormitory brainchild was politically biased. An investigation was launched and this is what the company found, as written in a post on Monday by Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch:

Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature. Our data analysis indicated that conservative and liberal topics are approved as trending topics at virtually identical rates. We were also unable to substantiate any of the specific allegations of politically-motivated suppression of particular subjects or sources. In fact, we confirmed that most of the subjects mentioned in media reports were included as trending topics on multiple occasions.

However, Stretch said the company couldn't rule out individual employees who may have made on-the-spot decisions to ignore conservative news sites, and so announced changes to current policies:

At the same time, our investigation could not fully exclude the possibility of isolated improper actions or unintentional bias in the implementation of our guidelines or policies. As part of our commitment to continually improve our products and to minimize risks where human judgment is involved, we are making a number of improvements to Trending Topics.

This will include updating the terminology to make sure what is set out in the company guidelines is clear. "Refresher training" to emphasize that "content decision may not be made on the basis of politics or ideology." Also, Facebook has decided to do away with its own lists of preferred (more liberal) news outlets that, up to this point, helped the algorithm decide what should trend:

We will no longer rely on lists of external websites and news outlets to identify, validate or assess the importance of particular topics. This means we will eliminate the “Media 1K” list, the list of RSS feeds used to supplement the algorithm that generates potential trending topics, and the top-10 list of news outlets.

We are also removing the ability to assign an “importance level” to a topic through assessment of the topic’s prominence on the top-10 list of news outlets.

Thune said Facebook's "seriousness" in its investigation of these allegations was "encouraging." 

Glenn Beck was also at the meeting and posted his reaction in a blog post. His take was altogether different and said he walked away "deeply disturbed" at what he heard from other conservatives.

"It was like affirmative action for conservatives," Beck wrote. "When did conservatives start demanding quotas AND diversity training AND less people from Ivy League Colleges?"

"What happened to us?" he continued. "When did we become them? When did we become the people who demand the Oscars add black actors based on race?"