SINGAPORE (Aug 30): Facebook’s Trending module was created to provide a snapshot of the news that popular among users at the moment. Of late, however, it has ironically found itself in the limelight instead – and not for quite the right reasons.
First, it was uncovered that news in Facebook’s trending section, believed to have been generated by algorithms, was in fact curated and tweaked by a team of human beings.
Leaked documents in May showed how a small editorial team worked in shifts around the clock, relying on old-fashioned news values on top of Facebook’s algorithms to determine what the hottest stories will be for the 1 billion people who visit the social network every day.
Amid growing concerns over how Facebook decides what is news for its users and accusations of editorial bias, Facebook on Friday announced that humans would no longer write descriptions for its Trending topics list.
Facebook laid off the entire editorial staff on the Trending team, and replaced them with a team of engineers to check that topics and articles surfaced by the algorithms are newsworthy.
Almost immediately, Facebook discovered something we already knew: you can’t send a machine to do a journalist’s job.
Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a fake news story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly, which referred to her as a “traitor” and claimed the cable channel had “kick[ed] her out for backing Hilary”.
Kelly is, in fact, currently still employed by Fox News, and has not endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.
But the algorithm was not yet done embarrassing its owner.
It later trended a controversial piece about a comedian’s attack on political commentator Ann Coulter, including a headline which called her a “Racist C*nt”. Then, as if to prove a point, it pushed out links to an article about a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald’s chicken sandwich.
Separately, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday told students at Rome's Luiss University that the firm will remain a technology platform and has no plans to become a media company.
This comes amid an increasing number of users that are turning to social media networks to find their news. The changing media landscape has seen Facebook turn into the biggest news distributor on the planet.
But when it comes to good ol’ news sense, it seems best to leave it to the professionals.