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Facebook Is Killing Off Trending As It Tries To Revamp Newsfeed (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: Facebook has announced plans to kill off the Trending feature of its newsfeed. The social network says that this is to "make way for future news experiences." Over the years, Facebook has experimented endlessly with the presentation of news, and has faced criticism for failing to weed out "fake news" and also accusations of liberal bias. Now the company wants to find new ways to help people find news that matters to them, ensuring that it comes from reliable sources.
More insidious is the cherry-picking of facts. My daughter did a science fair project on fake news this week, and she watched ten hours each of MSNBC and Fox News. Both stations generally presented facts even though Fox did a lot of editorialization/option pieces, but they were clearly presented as such. The problem was that there was very little overlap on the facts they presented.
A good example was Trey Gowdy's recent statement:
“I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do...President Trump himself – in the Comey memos – said, if anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it...He[Trump] was never the target – Russia was the target.”
MSNBC (and ABC that I watched) only mentioned the first part that the FBI did what they should. Fox News only covered the last part which is Trump was never the target. No one covered the important middle part that was that Trump himself asked for an investigation. That looks good for Trump, but everyone ignored that.