Facebook reduces role of human editors in ‘trending topics’

Who would have thought that a tiny section on Facebook’s homepage would cause so much controversy?

The change comes after the company was alleged to have employed editors in Trending that had discriminated against conservative news outlets. To eliminate the potential for bias, Facebook said it would no longer rely on editors to write descriptions for the topics and would instead show users the topic and how many people are discussing it. Human editors will no longer play a role in hand-picking the topics featured other than for verifying quality.

It’s been more than three months since Gizmodo first published a story claiming Facebook’s human editors were suppressing conservative news content on the site’s Trending Topics section.

These employees were also instructed to feature certain topics even if they weren’t popular, which also injected bias into the section. Facebook denied the report, which was published by Gizmodo and was sourced to a single former contractor on the team.

Human beings will continue to be “involved” in Trending Topics, separating legitimate news events from the mundane hashtags that trend every day (#lunch).

Here’s what Trending Topics will look like now.

“Our goal is to enable Trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied exclusively on summarizing topics by hand”, according to the blog post.

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.

Facebook is justifying the move as a way to roll out Trending to a wider audience, adding that the company plans to make the feature available to more people around the world. “This is something we always planned to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year”, the post reads.

Facebook said Friday that articles in the trending section surface “based on a high volume of mentions and a sharp increase in mentions over a short period of time”.