Facebook fires editorial staff of Trending Topics section: Report

Facebook changed its Trending Topics feature to make it AI driven. Though Facebook has made Trending feature more algorithmically driven, there still are people involved in this process. Facebook made these changes to its Trending Topics feature after it faced criticism earlier this year over claims the service was suppressing conservative views. A Gizmodo report published in May had claimed that links to ‘conservative articles’ in the ‘Trending’ Topics Section were suppressed, a charge Facebook had denied. Zuckerberg had then met conservative leaders in the US in order to address concerns raised by the report.

Facebook said at the time it had looked into these claims, and found no evidence of systematic bias. Post changes, Trending Topics section now shows the name of the trending topic along with the number of users talking about it, which is similar to how Twitter displays results around a Hashtag. Earlier, the trending topics appeared with a short description only.

Also read: Facebook to make ‘Trending Topics’ more automated

However, Facebook’s increased reliability on AI comes with its own shortcomings. A study published by Princeton University and the University of Bath says addressing bias in machine learning is harder. “Unfortunately, our work points to several additional reasons why addressing bias in machine learning will be harder than one might expect,” the study says. “Our results suggest that word embeddings don’t merely pick up specific, enumerable biases such as gender stereotypes, but rather the entire spectrum of human biases reflected in language,” it adds.