Facebook announced Friday that it is removing descriptions written by humans from its Trending news topics bar, following accusations earlier this year that the social media giant was harboring anti-conservative political bias.

In place of the short descriptions that debuted in 2014, Facebook said in a blog post that it will use algorithms to generate "simplified" topics, along with showing the number of people discussing the topic — similar to the trends bar on Twitter. The company also updated it's Trending Review Guidelines.

The way trending topics are chosen will remain the same, based on factors like a user's location and pages "liked," the company said. Hovering over or clicking on a topic will reveal what people are saying about it, along with an excerpt from the top article. People will still be involved in the process, but in a more hands-off role: making sure topics are related to actual news events happening around the world.

But these moderators will be engineers, not editors. Fifteen to 18 editors, the entire staff in charge of the trending bar, were laid off, sources told Quartz. The editors had been contracted through a third party.

In a report published by technology blog Gizmodo in May, former Facebook staffers said the company "suppressed" conservative news in its trending news bar, which included the Washington Examiner. The report sparked an immense backlash that led Facebook to deny that its employees were selectively omitting certain conservative news stories.

However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg afterwards held a meeting with conservative leaders. Later on in May, the company performed an internal investigation in which it was "unable to substantiate any of the specific allegations of politically-motivated suppression of particular subjects or sources." But, in order to avoid "isolated improper actions or unintentional bias," Facebook did change some of its policies to reduce reliance on outside news outlets to assess the newsworthiness of particular topics and said it was updating its guidelines and providing "refresher training" to reviewers on how to avoid bias.

"Earlier this year, we shared more information about Trending in response to questions about alleged political bias in the product," Facebook said Friday. "We looked into these claims and found no evidence of systematic bias."

"Still, making these changes to the product allows our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics. Facebook is a platform for all ideas, and we're committed to maintaining Trending as a way for people to access a breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics," the company said.