Business Insider - Reuters/Dado Ruvic As it negotiates a controversy about how it develops "trending" topics, Facebook is confronting thorny questions about political bias that have long dogged traditional news organizations. But the Facebook "scandal" highlights anew an important issue in a democracy frequently facing political stalemate: What role do digital news sources play in bridging ? or reinforcing ? political polarization? The social network responded to its conservative critics Monday with a series of changes to how it will choose trending news stories for its 1.1 billion daily users. It's not clear that the changes to this increasingly important news platform will result in more or less political bias. Facebook's "Trending" news feed may also be less influential, say observers, than what actually appears in each users news feed. That's because, unlike the trending feed, a user's news feed is affected by both an algorithm and who their friends are, though how much influence that algorith
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