Earlier this year, Facebook denied criticisms
that its Trending feature was surfacing news
stories that were biased against conservatives.
But in an abrupt reversal, the company fired all the human editors for Trending on Friday
afternoon, replacing them with an algorithm
that promotes stories based entirely on what
Facebook users are talking about. Within 72
hours, according to the Washington Post, the
top story on Trending was about how Fox News icon Megyn Kelly was a pro-Clinton "traitor" who had been fired (she wasn't).

The original accusations of bias came from a
disgruntled ex-editor at Facebook, who leaked
internal Trending training materials to Gizmodo. The training package offered tips on, among other things, how to curate news from an RSS feed of reputable sources when the stories provided by Facebook users were false or repetitive. Though the human editors were
always expendable—they were mostly there to
train the Trending algorithm—they were still
engaging in quality control to weed out blatant falsehoods and non-news like #lunch. And after Trending latched on to the fake Kelly scoop, it appears that human intervention might still be required to make Facebook's algorithms a legitimate source of news after all.

In a post about the changes, Facebook said the early move to eliminate human editors was a direct response to "the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year," an oblique reference to the raging controversy unleashed by the Gizmodo revelations. Facebook explained that the new, non-human Trending module is personalized "based on a number of factors, including Pages you’ve liked, your location (e.g., home state sports news), the previous trending topics with which you’ve interacted, and what is trending across Facebook overall." Instead of paying humans to "write topic descriptions and short story summaries," the company said "we’re relying on an algorithm to pull excerpts directly from news stories." Which is why millions of Facebook readers this morning saw the "news" that Megyn Kelly is a traitor who has been fired.

Supposedly, humans are still involved with
Trending in a few ways, such as "confirming
that a topic is tied to a current news event in
the real world." But that process appears to
have a few bugs. As Abby Ohlheiser puts it in
the Washington Post:

The trending “news” article about Kelly
is an Ending the Fed article that is
basically just a block quote of a blog
post from National Insider Politics, which
itself was actually aggregated from a
third conservative site, Conservative
101. All three sites use the same
“BREAKING” headline. The Conservative
101 post is three paragraphs long and
basically reads as anti-Kelly fan fiction
accusing her of being a “closet liberal”
who is about to be removed from the
network by a Trump-supporting O’Reilly.
It cites exactly one news source as a
basis for its speculation: the Vanity Fair
piece [about the internal fight to keep
the popular conservative host at the
network.]

There were so many problems with this story,
ranging from plagiarism to falsity, that even a
fairly simple-minded robot editor should have
caught them. The Trending algorithm is clearly
not ready for prime time, or maybe Facebook is just trying to redefine what it calls "a breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics."

Source: http//:www.arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/facebook-fires-human-editors-algorithm-immediately-posts-fake-news/