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?

[negRo_slim]

What about those of us who are tired-as-fuck of what is considered news today? Shallow, vapid, manipulated and without a shred of integrity. American News, fuck yeah.

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.

Open Pandering

[s.petry]

The real difference between the USSR's Pravda and the Murdoch/Disney media is that most Russian People were smart enough to know they were being brain washed, and admitted it when needed. People like you on the other hand..

Shows like "The Daily Show", which for years were a better source for an unbiased perspective, are today have turned purely biased. Stewart was left leaning too, especially on things like the 2nd Amendment, but at least it was not the full open bias we have today. He offered the countering position and occasionally made fun of the lefts mistakes in the process. The current media tells you openly that Hillary "deserves" to be President and that the competition is an Ad Hominem of their choosing (without facts to back their position in most cases). This is such an open bias that you should question the Hegelian dialectic on other stations with the same owners. That same media also happen to claim that any opposing positions to the Progressive Left is "angry", "baseless", "Conspiracy", "Outrageous", "Unjust", "bigoted", "Racist", and anything else which can be leveraged to silence opposition. And you believe them? Shame on you. Or perhaps you get paid to make such asinine claims, in which case Shame on YOU!

Re:Open Pandering

[Raenex]

Hillary isn't "progressive left". She is, at best, a little left of center.

She pays lip service to the "progressive" left.

The media also isn't labeling the right as angry/bigoted/racist/etc. They've earned those titles through their actions and what they've said.

And you don't think that's there on the left? Either you choose to ignore it or you haven't been paying any attention.

Re:What about the rest of us?

[FudRucker]

i think the federal government is experimenting on the public, they are trying to see just how awful and corrupt a politician can be before people quit voting at elections, Both Clinton and Trump are terrible and i wont bother to vote because they are just too awful

Re:What about the rest of us?

[ShanghaiBill]

Oh, there's plenty to be mad about but I'm not sure if we'll agree to be mad at the same things.

Actually, people are mostly mad about the same things. They just don't agree on the solutions.

Can we just get rid of it?

[Yaztromo]

The only bias I see is that for some reason, Facebook seems to think I'm in any way interested in celebrity gossip, because that's about all that ever shows up in the "Trending" section for me.

I'm interested in science and technology, but every "trending" topic I seem to see is something about what Britney Spears ate for breakfast, or whose dress Catelyn Jenner wore to the mall, or some other equally banal and useless piece of "news" about some celebrity that I don't give a crap about.

I'm not even exaggerating. My current "trending" topics include:

• - What's coming up on Netflix next month (US Netflix, that is. I'm Canadian and watch Canadian Netflix, and we don't get the same new movies the US does, so it's even more useless)
• - "Go topless day"
• - Some sort of conspiracy theory about Herman Cain and Epi Pens
• - Some nonsense about whether or not some pastor endorsed Donald Trump or not
• - Something about some guy I've never heard of who got roasted by Twitter due to his hairstyle
• - Five reasons to see some movie I've never heard of
• - The 77th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz
• - Something about Britney Spears doing karaoke

As you can see, my "trending" doesn't have a Liberal or Conservative slant -- it just has a inanely stupid slant.

"Trending" is the least useful part of Facebook, and personally I wish they'd just get rid of it altogether.

Yaz

Re:How does the algorithm decide?

[globaljustin]

Bias in algorithms is from human action...conscious or not.

There is no debate on the point above. All software is made by humans, even software generated by other software...humans originated the commands and instructions.

Let's just repeat that last part for you, guy: *humans originated the commands and instructions*

Here's an example you can understand: Which 'fact checking site' will you use?

Politifact.com - which is bullshit but has some factual information

or

Factcheck.org - not as flashy as Politifact and not quite as quickly updated but it's actual fact checking (Trump as melted their faces off).

So you make the call.

No matter what you do, someone will be able to rationally accuse you of "bias"