After bias furor, Facebook replaces people with algorithms

Facebook is apologizing after featuring a fake, sensational news story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly in its influential “Trending” topics section. The hoax story claimed the “closet liberal” was “on her way out” at the cable news network after a charge led by Bill O’Reilly called to remove her for scrutinizing Donald Trump and allegedly seeking to help Hillary Clinton win the presidential election.

Update, 12:05PM ET: A Facebook spokesperson said that the trending team accepted the topic over the weekend, because there was a sufficient number of relevant articles and posts, but upon review today they chose to take it down.

The promotion of the bogus Megyn Kelly story follows changes to the Trending Topics feature, announced on August 26, which removed the description of the topics that were previously written by humans.

So Facebook has decided to make a some changes to Trending Topics.

Despite investigations showing that censoring of news was not happening at Trending Topics, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) may have made up its mind to limit human involvement in the news feature.

Facebook said Friday it is further automating its “trending” stories feature, a move that will scale back human input to prevent personal bias from influencing which stories get highlighted.

Humans at Facebook, however, are still responsible for identifying Megyn Kelly-related garbage.

“I want to have a direct conversation about what Facebook stands for and how we can be sure our platform stays as open as possible”, Zuckerberg said in May Facebook post. Stories from the tech blog Gizmodo claimed the team that manages the feature for the social networking giant chose stories based on their political beliefs and not merely based on what was popular on the site.

Facebook nixed the written description that was included under the topics and instead inserted an approximate number of people now discussing the topic. The company did not say whether it was laying off employees.

Heading forward, all you’ll see is a list of trending topics that have been identified by Facebook’s algorithm.

For example, “lunch” trends everyday around lunch time, but will not appear in the box unless there is some news-related reason, like Al Roker and Yung Joc eating lunch topless. Facebook said it found no evidence of political bias.

Moreover, a former journalist also alleged Facebook for knowingly suppressing news stories of interests to unadventurous readers.

Just days after Facebook announced it was getting rid of all of its news curators, the site let a fraudulent story about Fox News moderator and Megyn Kelly rise to the top of its powerful trending news section, which can set the tone for whether a story or piece of content goes viral.

Supposedly, humans are still involved with Trending in a few ways, such as “confirming that a topic is tied to a current news event in the real world”.