A couple of weeks ago, Facebook drove into a bit of trouble after firing its editorial team for Trending Topics with the module pushing out the false story about Fox’s Megyn Kelly. That being a lesson to the social networking giant, it is now focusing at preventing fake news stories from showing up in the Trending section. The announcement was first made on Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.
Earlier, we saw Facebook introduce a similar approach towards preventing the spread of fake stories, hoaxes and clickbait in its News Feed.
Apparently, a similar algorithm will be used to curate the Trending Topics section of Facebook now. With no more humans working on the content management part (at least in this sector), it’s now completely up to algorithms to drive the product. And as a computer cannot differentiate between real and fake news, the company has faced a lot of trouble since.
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“A system where we talk about the topic and the number of people speaking about the topic actually scales better internationally and we care a lot about scaling,”
Facebook’s News Feed head, Adam Mosseri said.
“We tried to make sure we have one experience that adapts based on people’s usage across the world, and not to have different types of products in different countries – that becomes much more difficult to maintain and execute on.”
Sure, there’s still a long way to go for both Trending Topics and the Facebook News Feeds, but this is a start.
