FACEBOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

Update to Trending Topics

NO MORE FAKE NEWS

● Facebook rolled out a major change to its "Trending Topics” section

● Resulted in everyone in the U.S. seeing the same news stories

● The goal is to become timelier and more in line with the news of the moment — and a bit more resistant to

"fake news."

● Overall reducing potential bias

NEW LAYOUT

In response, to an accusation that Facebook was angling news discussions to their benefit,

● it got rid of manual news curators and switched to a mostly algorithm-fuelled Trending feed, ● topic descriptions were removed to further reduce the need for manual interference, or editors.

STILL PROBLEMS

● Possibilities of manual manipulation and potential bias were eliminated, however:

● An algorithm doesn’t have the abilities of a human,

○ it pumps out a list of what’s highly shared

○ resulted in false news reports showing up in the Trending list

● Fake news following the 2016 US presidential Election

● Facebook needed to fix this

SOLUTION

In order to resolve the problems with Trending,

● Facebook’s new system shows the headline from a publisher’s article about the topic

○ Facebook says was the most requested feature addition since the last update.

“The headline that appears is automatically selected based on a combination of factors including the engagement around the article on Facebook, the engagement around the publisher

overall, and whether other articles are linking to it.”

“This should surface trending topics quicker, be more effective at capturing a broader range of news and events from around the

world and also help ensure that trending topics reflect real world events being covered by multiple news outlets.”

WHATDO

YOU THINK?