Facebook announced the Trending feature in 2014, but you may not be familiar with it because it still isn’t available to everyone.
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The site previously had editors who picked out the stories that were trending on the site, highlighted those that were newsworthy, wrote small descriptions and pushed them out into people’s Facebooks. The company claims that the retooling of the section will augment its scalability and personalization. So Facebook tried something new, fired all their human editors for the Trending feature, replaced them with an algorithm created to recognize what stories are most talked about, and it backfired.
Within just 24 hours of it being handed over to the algorithm users reported seeing a story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly which it turns out is entirely fake. Facebook’s algorithms recently made that mistake and many people had no idea the story was fake. As of last weekend, the social networking forum got rid of the explanatory descriptions altogether and rolled out a cleaner, simpler version of the updated Facebook trending topics list. Here’s the story and the website that was trending BTW.
One was headlined: “BREAKING: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out For Backing Hillary”. The feature that shows most talked about topics of the day came under scrutiny two months ago when a news report stated it suppressed conservative news. The company said it found no evidence of any bias, but still said all employees would have to undergo political bias training. But the decision to replace humans with algorithms is not working out as smoothly as Facebook might have hoped.
The company said that people would still be responsible for selecting which stories are actual news events and not simply reoccurring discussions or fake stories.
Facebook has so far declined to comment on the situation. This number is based on “the number of original posts that mention the topic and shares of posts about the topic”.
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Humans will still be involved in the process to ensure that topics are real-world news and not based on an internet trend like #lunch.
