Dive Brief:
- Facebook is changing its Trending feature to reduce human editorial decisions and automate the feature, according to a blog post.
- Stories that appear in "Trending" will now be chosen by an algorithm. The feature will no longer show a headline and description, instead featuring a topic and the number of people talking about it on Facebook.
- “Our goal is to enable Trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied solely on summarizing topics by hand," Facebook explained. "A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time. This is something we always hoped to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year.”
Dive Insight:
After reports of bias against conversative news sites in its Trending section, Facebook conducted an internal investigation and found no evidence of bias. But despite those findings, Facebook is now making changes to the way it picks out Trending stories and the way in which it describes them to users.
“… making these changes to the product allows our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics," Facebook said in a blog post announcing the move. "Facebook is a platform for all ideas, and we’re committed to maintaining Trending as a way for people to access a breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics.”
Facebook has been active in maintaining a good experience for its users — and that includes making sure that conversatives don't feel like Facebook has a left-leaning bias, especially in its Trending section, where it hosts news. Algorithms themselves are created by humans, of course, but the change could help Facebook reduce the perception of bias.
