Nearly two months after Facebook faced allegations of bias in its "Trending" topics module, the company is asserting its objectivity with a set of published values for its main product: the News Feed.

“We are not in the business of picking which issues the world should read about,” reads the company’s News Feed Values, published Wednesday. “… Our integrity depends on being inclusive of all perspectives and view points, and using ranking to connect people with the stories and sources they find the most meaningful and engaging.”

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“We don’t favor specific kinds of sources — or ideas,” the statement continues. “Our aim is to deliver the types of stories we’ve gotten feedback that an individual person most wants to see. We do this not only because we believe it’s the right thing but also because it’s good for our business.”

The statement comes nearly two months after an anonymous former employee working on Facebook’s Trending section alleged that conservative news sources were prevented from appearing in the site’s Trending module (which appears in a small box on the upper right of the Facebook homepage for desktop users, and is somewhat hidden for mobile users). The claim outraged some conservative legislators, news organizations and pundits, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with conservative leaders to smooth things over, even as he and other Facebook executives said the allegations weren’t true.

Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s product manager for the news feed, told POLITICO that Facebook’s news feed has made decisions with an unofficial version of the values statement in mind for several years, but that now was the right time for more transparency on how and why Facebook tweaks the news feed the way it does.

“I’ve been saying these things for a long time,” Mosseri said. “But as of late, it came to our attention that we needed to be more proactive and transparent about how we make decisions about News Feed. This is one important step in doing that.”

The values statement also emphasizes that the site will favor content from friends and family and content that is informative and entertaining over sensational or misleading stories.

Facebook is releasing its values statement at the same time that it is announcing an update to its news feed algorithm, which determines how posts on Facebook’s feed are ordered for its users to see.

Like many of the updates Facebook has made over the past several months, this newest tweak to the algorithm will favor content from friends and family over posts from publishers. That, in turn, is likely to negatively impact some publishers who distribute their content on Facebook.

“Overall, we anticipate that this update may cause reach and referral traffic to decline for some Pages,” Facebook’s engineering director Lars Backstrom wrote in a statement about the updated algorithm. “The specific impact on your Page’s distribution and other metrics may vary depending on the composition of your audience.”

Mosseri said that some publishers – like BuzzFeed’s food brand, Tasty, for example — won’t see much of an impact, since lots of people share and interact with their posts on their own pages.

“If friends and family are sharing that content, Facebook will treat it as a friend's post, not as a publisher's post,” Mosseri said.

But if publishers rely on referral traffic generated predominately from posts they publish themselves on Facebook throughout the day, there is likely to be a “small but noticeable drop in reach,” he said.

As a distribution tool, Facebook has become increasingly critical to publishers, and the latest iteration to Facebook’s algorithm is likely to trigger another ripple of concern in publishing and media circles.