After facing a huge controversy, Facebook’s tiny Trending section has undergone a makeover. The Trending Section has been updated to rely more on an algorithmic process and less on Human Curators.
Human Editors and Curators will no longer write short descriptions for topics in the Trending section. Instead, it will adopt a small phrase or a single word and will also show how many people are discussing it. Users can hover over it or click it to read more about it.
These changes come after Gizmodo published a report, earlier this year, alleging Facebook for being biased against conservative news outlets and suppressing conservative news in its Trending section. Gizmodo also stated that the Curators and Editors at Facebook were instructed to ignore conservative topics and feature topics which were not popular. Although Facebook denied these allegations, no major changes were made in this regard, until now.
It is reported that the Editorial Team behind the Trending Section were notified at 4PM that they are being fired and were asked to vacate the building in an hour. They were given severance equal to pay through September 1, plus two weeks.
However, not all humans are eliminated from the Trending Section’s process, as few engineers will be correcting any mistakes made by the algorithms. They would mainly be focusing on preventing repetitive stories.
Facebook promised to listen to the community and make further changes if required, to provide valuable Trending Experience.
