Facebook featured a 9/11 conspiracy theory on its Trending topics list Friday morning, linking to a story claiming bombs, not planes, caused the Twin Towers to fall in 2001.
Advertisement
When contacted, Facebook representatives said they were aware of a “hoax article” showing up and were working to remove it immediately.
9/11 anniversary hoaxes are flooding Facebook.
This is just the latest in a string of bad publicity that Facebook has been getting since removing humans from its screening process when selecting articles for its “Trending” section.
With the 15 anniversary of the attacks coming, it was no surprise that 9/11 would be on the rise on the trending list. Facebook’s trending section was being criticised for conservative approach to political news stories and some of the curators criticised the social network giant for being unfair with the work ethics. So, the issue now took a down point after her apologize.
Facebook has encountered increased criticism since it switched from a human team that picks trending topics to an algorithm.
Bear in mind that the Facebook Trending Topics algorithm is assigned a number of tasks.
“The review team is responsible for accepting all algorithmically detected topics that reflect real-world events”, states the Trending Topics guidelines [PDF] that Facebook released in August 2016.
Facebook claims human editors are still involved in the fine-tuning of its Trending feed, but on a reduced scale.
Advertisement
The main problem is not the topics but the fake leading links that have emerged. In it, there’s not a single step concerning such links.
