Facebook Says Humans Won't Write Its Trending Topic Descriptions Anymore (recode.net)

Following a former Facebook journalist's report that the company's workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's Trending Topics section, the company has been in damage control mode. First, the company announced it would tweak its Trending Topics section and revamp how editors find trending stories. Specifically, they will train the human editors who work on Facebook's trending section and abandon several automated tools it used to find and categorize trending news in the past. Most recently, Facebook added political scenarios to its orientation training following the concerns. Now, it appears that Facebook will "end its practice of writing editorial descriptions for topics, replacing them with snippets of text pulled from news stories." Kurt Wagner, writing for Recode: It's been more than three months since Gizmodo first published a story claiming Facebook's human editors were suppressing conservative news content on the site's Trending Topics section. Facebook vehemently denied the report, but has been dealing with the story's aftermath ever since. On Friday, Facebook announced another small but notable change to Trending Topics: Human editors will no longer write the short story descriptions that accompany a trending topic on the site. Instead, Facebook is going to use algorithms to "pull excerpts directly from stories." It is not, however, cutting out humans entirely. In fact, Facebook employees will still select which stories ultimately make it into the trending section. An algorithm will surface popular stories, but Facebook editors will weed out the inappropriate or fake ones. "There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality," the company's blog reads.

Comments

humans never did

[turkeydance]

progressives did. it's Friday. that's all i've got.

Re:humans never did

[JoeMerchant]

Whether humans are hand selecting the topics, or algorithms written and tuned by humans are selecting the topics according to a corporate approved prescription - simple fact is: humans are still selecting the topics. Maybe the algorithmic approach is less subject to individual bias, maybe it's not.

Re:What about the rest of us?

[geek]

That's largely because being a conservative these days largely seems to involve being mad about something.

If you're not mad at the way this country is going then you're either not sane or a fucking asshole.

Re:What about the rest of us?

[JackieBrown]

That's largely because being a conservative these days largely seems to involve being mad about something.

Get that idea from Facebook trending stories?

Re:Self-inflicted

[Pharmboy]

Yes, and those idiot's votes count the same as yours and mind. It is amazing how many people "me too" jump on some bullshit I've already proven to be false a few times before. Hoax is the poisoning of the mind for people too stupid to do their own thinking and prefer their news in a 600x600 image square. Whoever controls these drones, controls the vote, because they are half the population.

Or to paraphrase George Carlin, think about how stupid the average person is, then remember that half the population is dumber than they are.