#TRENDING NEWS IN FACEBOOK SERIES#
The removal of Trending is just the latest in a series of moves by Facebook to slow to spread of false content, the efforts for which could be expected to ramp up in the months leading to the 2018 U.S. "The idea was that coverage by just one outlet," wrote The Guardian's Press Association, "could be a sign that the news is fake." The company made several efforts to fix that prior to announcing the removal of the section, including ranking only topics that were covered by several news publishers. However, despite Facebook's claims that "our team is responsible for reviewing Trending topics to ensure that they reflect real world events," news content that was often less-than-real sometimes slipped through the cracks and still made its way onto the Trending section. presidential election, largely through ad content. However, much of what is often most popularly shared consists of false content e.g., a "live feed" of the supermoon cast in February of this year that actually turned out to be a continual broadcast of a still image with sound effects playing over it, which received at least 16 million views.įacebook has announced a number of features and efforts to curb the spread of such false content since it was first revealed that the site was weaponized by foreign actors to spread misinformation and influence the 2016 U.S. 2. Facebook Has Come Under Fire for Fake News Ranking on TrendingĪs Facebook has said itself, Trending aggregates news topics based on what's being shared on Facebook by users the most. "If they’re committed to transparency, they can’t remove that content from the Trending section. "It seems to me like it could also be a strategic move on the brand side, given how much of the 'trending' news over the past few months has been around the Cambridge Analytica controversy," says Annabelle Nyst, a HubSpot content strategist. Trending saying goodbye in the only way it knows how /8rqzQp69Wg When news broke that Trending would be phased out, for example - it, too, was discovered by many to take a top rank withing Trending. Those stories have often taken a top position on the site's Trending list.
Trending, according to Facebook's official description, aggregates the most popular news items among Facebook users "based on the number of publishers that are posting articles on Facebook about that subject and the engagement level of those articles."īut Facebook has received a high degree of scrutiny and related news coverage over the past year, from a series of PR nightmares ranging from its role in election interference to the misuse of personal data by voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica. Why Is Facebook Really Removing Trending? 1. Negative Stories About Facebook Often Appear in Trending Here's how our experts weighed in on the matter. To take a deep dive into them, I posed the question to my team: "What is this really about?" However, many suspect that there are other reasons for the removal of Trending from Facebook. Trending was first launched in 2014 "as a way to help people discover news topics that were popular across the Facebook community," Hardiman wrote, but will now be phased out as Facebook introduces additional news-related products.
"We’re removing Trending soon to make way for future news experiences on Facebook," wrote Facebook Head of News Products Alex Hardiman in an official statement. "From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful."
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