A person holds an iPhone displaying the Facebook app logo in front of a computer screen showing the facebook login page. (Photo : Getty Images/Carl Court)
Facebook's Trending Topics algorithm has trended fake news story after removing their human editors. The social media website revealed that they fired the editors due to the necessity of scaling the algorithm to a broader audience.
According to The Washington Post, the algorithm chose a factually incorrect headline to explain a trending topic. This happened a few days after the change of Facebook's policies. It chose fake news that explained why Megyn Kelly was a popular topic.
The headline featured the Fox News personality as a traitor. It also claimed that the cable channel has fired her for supporting Hillary Clinton, which was a false accusation.
Facebook featured the fake news article as the top news story as of Monday morning. Kelly's name disappeared from the Trending list after a few hours. It maintained the social media site's top story spot for several hours.
The Fox News personality has not been fired by the cable company, but she was the focus of a recent article. Vanity Fair made one about the internal fight to keep her at the network. It suggested that the network might have to choose between her and Bill O'Reilly, another popular personality.
This is not the first time that Facebook's Trending section has been showing bad headlines by their algorithm. A few days ago, other inappropriate headlines have also trended. These headlines included a topic about Ann Coulter being a sexist slur, and a video about a man who masturbated with a McDonald's sandwich.
According to the official blog of Facebook, they have automated their Trending Topics section with their own algorithm. The change resulted in removing the need for human editors to write descriptions of their trending topics.
The algorithm considers a combination of volume and momentum. Trending topics have a lot of mentions on the internet, and they are increasing at a faster rate. It has a similar type of process to sort search results for individual topics.
Facebook always meant to remove the human editors from the Trending process as early as possible, but it was accelerated recently. The social media site said in a statement that they wanted to make the changes sooner after the feedback they got from the community earlier this year.
Check out Facebook's Treding Stories video below:
