![]() ![]() Troubles with the trending section began to emerge in 2016, when the company was accused of bias against conservatives, based on the words of an anonymous former contractor who said Facebook downplayed conservative issues in the trending section and promoted liberal causes. adults get some or all of their news through Facebook. But instead of having Facebook's moderators, human or otherwise, make editorial decisions, there's also been a subtle shift to let news organizations do so.Īccording to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of U.S. In an interview ahead of Friday's announcement, Facebook's head of news products, Alex Hardiman, said the company is still committed to breaking and real-time news. Facebook also wants to make local news more prominent. While Facebook is killing the trending section, it is testing new features, including a "breaking news" label that publishers can add to stories to distinguish them from other chatter. Trending news that year included the death of Robin Williams, Ebola and the World Cup. "Fake news" wasn't yet a popular term, and no foreign country had been accused of trying to influence the U.S. It fit nicely into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pledge just a year earlier to make Facebook its users' "personal newspaper."īut that was then. When Facebook launched "trending" in 2014 as a list of headlines to the side of the main news feed, it was a straightforward move to steal users from Twitter by giving them a quick look at the most popular news of the moment. But the trending section also proved problematic in ways that would presage Facebook's later problems with fake news, political balance and the limitations of artificial intelligence in managing the messy human world. The company claims the tool is outdated and wasn't popular. ![]()
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