Facebook recently sacked the team of journalists responsible for curating trending topics and completely replaced them with an algorithm.
This was in response to a Gizmodo article that alleged that Facebook routinely suppressed conservative news. Conservatives were justifiably outraged, and Facebook took measures to appear an unbiased arbiter of information.
But be careful what you wish for, as now Facebook’s new “objective” trending topics section is completely useless.
Before the firings, each trending topic would include a short blurb explaining the story surrounding the key word. Now the topics are only keywords, similar to Twitter’s “trends” box. That wouldn’t be a huge deal though if you could figure out what the hell’s going on when you click on the topics.
For instance, when I clicked on Watch Dogs 2 (a soon-to-be-released video game) the first result was “Watch this dog’s reaction when this man gets home after two years abroad!” Or when I clicked on Justice League, it gave me wildly different stories about the movie and it was difficult to gauge why the term was trending.
And these are minor complaints compared to yesterday when a fake story about Megyn Kelly getting fired from Fox News for being a secret Clinton supporter, found its way into the trending section.
Obviously Facebook should be transparent and honest about keeping its platform unbiased, but the site is still a technology that is meant for human consumption. When looking for the news of the day, people don’t want the first 10 answers of an equation but real stories about the world around them. Despite the potential for abuse, Facebook should rehire their trending team or risk the trending section joining the crowded trash pile of other useless features on the platform.