Facebook’s “Trending” feature to get a makeover
27 Aug 2016
Facebook's ''Trending'' feature, which listed a few popular news topics on the social network's homepage, will get a makeover the social network said yesterday. Most notably, Facebook's hot topics would not appear next to descriptions that are written by humans.
Rather, the social network would show each subject, usually a celebrity's latest scandal or a current event, next to the number of people who were discussing it on the service. Human editors would now, not plays any role in hand-picking the topics featured other than for quality verification.
The changes come after a controversy earlier this summer with tech news site Gizmodo publishing a report alleging that the Facebook's Trending section was biased against conservative news outlets. The report, which cited accounts from anonymous former contract employees who worked on the Trending section, said the employees were instructed to ignore topics that conservative users clicked on by keeping them out of the list.
The employees were also told to feature certain topics even if they were not popular which also introduced bias into the section.
According to Quartz, as part of the change, the social network, eliminated the jobs of 15 to 18 contractors hired to write short descriptions of each Trending Topics item.
The contractors came to know their services at the company were not required any more, at 4 pm eastern time yesterday – around the same time, that Facebook released a blog announcing the changes.
Now, according to Quartz, the only humans involved with Trending Topics would be Facebook engineers who corrected flaws in the algorithm, like ensuring that the same news item did not show up on the list twice with slightly different names.
Facebook's Trending Topics had been a subject of much scrutiny since the spring of 2016, when former Trending Topics editors claimed that they were deliberately suppressing conservative leaning news items from appearing on the list.
