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The Washington Post Tracked Facebook's Trending Topics For 3 Weeks, Found 5 Fake Stories and 3 Inaccurate Articles (washingtonpost.com)
An alarming number of people rely on social media, including and especially Facebook, for news. Over the past few months, we have seen how Facebook's Trending Topics feature is often biased, and moreover, how sometimes fake news slips through its filter. The Washington Post monitored the website for over three weeks and found that Facebook is still struggling to get its algorithm right. From the report: The Megyn Kelly incident was supposed to be an anomaly. An unfortunate one-off. A bit of (very public, embarrassing) bad luck. But in the six weeks since Facebook revamped its Trending system -- and a hoax about the Fox News Channel star subsequently trended -- the site has repeatedly promoted "news" stories that are actually works of fiction. As part of a larger audit of Facebook's Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were profoundly inaccurate (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). On top of that, we found that news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended. Facebook declined to comment about Trending on the record. "I'm not at all surprised how many fake stories have trended," one former member of the team that used to oversee Trending told the Post. "It was beyond predictable by anyone who spent time with the actual functionality of the product, not just the code."The Post adds that "there's no guarantee" that it was able to catch every hoax, since it looked at Trending feature only once every hour.
The feature is called "Trending", not "Factual News". If I photoshop a picture of my cat flying a jet and it goes viral... it's trending. That doesn't mean he's actually flying the jet.
Here's some news for you... Satire can be popular.
Did they have any fake or inaccurate stories over the same period of time? How many corrections did they have to make? The New York Times had to make two corrections to an article about Gary Johnson's Aleppo gaffe on the same day.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
So how many stories total did they track? Is 5 stories half the stories? Is it 5% of the stories? Without context '5 stories' is meaningless.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I hate to defend Facebook here, but if you RTFA, you will see that some of the supposed "fake" and "inaccurate" articles were actually spoofs. People posted them because they were funny. That's like stopping by The Onion and complaining that the news is biased and inaccurate.