Good riddance, Facebook Trending
If you run a website that curates breaking news. I’m sure it’s tempting to send in a computer to do the job of a human journalist. After all, computer algorithms typically work longer hours than human journalists and they don’t ask for overtime pay. Nor do they drink on the job.
But they are prone to their own brand of problematic behaviour: they sometimes have a tough time differentiating fact from falsehood.
Facebook learned this the hard way. This month, the social network announced plans to eliminate its controversial, algorithm-operated, “trending” news sidebar. How do I know this? I saw it trending, ironically, on the sidebar itself. How’s that for Meta?
A little background: you may recall that long before Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was mired in a controversy about user privacy, he was in the hot seat for a very different reason. Political bias.
In 2016, the social network fired its stable of human news curators after a former Facebook staffer claimed in a Gizmodo article that FB deliberately suppressed conservative topics in the trending sidebar.
In a likely attempt to show political neutrality, FB ditched its human editors for a strictly computer-operated system. But another problem emerged: the algorithm tasked with churning out breaking news headlines in Facebook’s “trending” bar had a tendency to promote what is now referred to as “fake news.”
Suddenly, millions of FB users were being inundated with false news reports, including one touting a 9/11 con- spiracy theory and another “outing” news anchor Megyn Kelly as a closet Hillary Clinton supporter.
Fast-forward two years and FB is canning its algorithm editors, too. According to the site’s head of news products, Alex Hardiman, writing in a statement released this month:
“We’re removing Trending soon to make way for future news experiences on Facebook. We introduced Trending in 2014 as a way to help people discover news topics that were popular across the Facebook community. However, it was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5 per cent of clicks to news publishers on average. From research, we found that, over time, people found the product to be less and less useful.”
To say this news is a boon for international media literacy is a major understatement. Facebook may be downplaying the reach and usefulness of Trending these past few years but the feature was more than a simple sidebar.
It operated almost exactly as the front page of a newspaper does for a demographic of readers who have never, and will never, subscribe to a traditional media outlet.
Even if Facebook users never clicked on the headlines that appeared in their “trending” sidebars, they saw those headlines.
And for the millions of people who get their news from Facebook every day (one study indicates that nearly half of Americans use the social network to access news), those headlines painted a very clear and very limited picture of what was happening in the world and what was relevant enough to be deemed officially viral.
For many people with only a cursory interest in current events, FB’s Trending sidebar made up the majority of their media diet. It was the virtual equivalent of walking by a newspaper kiosk in a big city and scanning all of the headlines on display. Its ability to spread misinformation was massive. And now it’s gone.
My hope is that its demise will trigger a rejection of other trend-based news algorithms that favour what is popular, and often false, at the expense of what is important and true.
Though I do admit, I will miss reading the accidental poetry on my Facebook Trending sidebar. From this week: “Reese Witherspoon Bringing The Gang Back for Legally Blonde 3. Michigan State University physicist charged with bestiality. Cats survive 22 days in car.”