Facebook said it will stop using a team of contractors that sorted through the news, some of whom anonymously leaked concerns about bias to the news site Gizmodo. They make sure newsworthy topics show up in the trending sections over recurring topics like discussions of midday activities under #lunch. Before our series of reports, Facebook publicly claimed Trending Topics were “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook”.
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Here’s what Trending Topics will look like now.
“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 official blog post says.
“Making these changes to the product allows our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics”.
In place of the description, Facebook will now tell you how many people are talking about a given topic.
Today, Facebook made the announcement that humans would no longer be writing special descriptions for the stories that appear in the site’s Trending Topics area seen on the top right of your Facebook profile. This is based on the number of original posts that mention the topic and shares of posts about the topic. Instead, an algorithm will comb through news stories about an event and select a snippet to display when users click through on a trend or (on the desktop) hover over it with their mice. Search results pages will include news sources covering it, posts discussing it, and automatically selected original news story with an excerpt. That’s at odds with Facebook’s stated goal of enabling ‘Trending for as many people as possible.’ By relying more on the algorithm and ditching the summaries, Facebook can deliver a higher number of trending items to more people.
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Facebook Inc.FB 0.86 % said Friday it is letting software nearly entirely drive what appears in its “trending” feature, scaling back the human intervention that led to allegations of political bias earlier this year. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for.
