Facebook Trending jumps the credibility-shark with Megyn Kelly snafu

Facebook’s updated news-curating algorithm relies on problematic pulp-news media feeds to spin the influential Trending section.

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Sunday, barely three days after the new Facebook Trending curated-by-algorithm section premiered, a false story, alleging Megyn Kelly‘s departure from Fox News, made the Trending list. Oops.

In a calculated gesture intended to remove human bias from its popular Trending section, Facebook fired the entire editorial team responsible for the copy last week, replacing them with an algorithm supported by engineers. Was this Facebook’s response to criticism for suppressing Facebook‘s organically trending Republican and Conservative topics?

Within three days of the human-to-algorithm changeover, Megyn Kelly was featured on Trending and linked to a post headlined “Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out For Backing Hillary.” The algorithm-sourced fake lead post from the reactionary pulp-news website Ending The Fed (ETF) was aggregated from National Insider Politics that copied the content from the original source Conservative 101. None of those posts were fact-based.

(FYI, recently it appears ETF updates only its political vertical, if you’re interested in ETF‘s technology posts, this will have to do, This $3,000 chair turns your butt into a VR controller.)

Suffice it to say, the content of Trending’s Megyn Kelly’s lead post was incorrect. Kelly broadcasts The Kelly File on Fox News weekday nights. And, there’s chatter about whether Kelly was defamed in the post by Facebook. Pundits inThe Atlantic’s “Did Facebook Defame Megyn Kelly?” are leaning towards “Yes.”

Facebook’s reveal of the new algorithm-based Trending was accompanied by assurances, including:

"There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality — for example, confirming that a topic is tied to a current news event in the real world."

and,

"A real-world event is something that happened recently, is happening now or will happen in the future. It’s intentionally broad so that we can be inclusive of a wide range of interests. … We should accept every detected topic unless it meets one of these criteria:Doesn’t represent real-world event — We cannot find any correlation to a real-world event based on a review of the feed of articles and public posts in the review tool."

View of televison journalist Megyn Kelly, of the Fox Network, as she reports from the Republican National Convention (RNC) , Cleveland, Ohio, July 21, 2016. (Photo by Mark Reinstein/Getty Images)

Pre-algorithm, a Facebook Trending team of journalist-news-curators wrote the headlines for the topics, attached relevant Facebook media, and chose the most credible post with the essential information. According to Gizmodo, the curators were told

"to select articles from a list of preferred media outlets that included sites like the New York Times, Time, Variety, and other traditional outlets. They would regularly avoid sites like World Star Hip Hop, The Blaze, and Breitbart, but were never explicitly told to suppress those outlets."

As a Facebook and Twitter user, I get creeped out by the algorithms employed by social media to cater-pander to my interests with suggested posts and news feeds. This is a reminder that Facebook, despite the masquerade, is not a news source, it’s a place to hang out with friends and watch dog, cat and horse videos.

Next: Notorious RBG tells it like it is!

It remains to be seen if Facebook Trending can claw back its audience from this breach of trust in the site as a core source of news.

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