Facebook has announced that it will be scaling back on human input in order to avoid personal bias from having an impact on which stories get highlighted. This change will be done by automating the feature of treading stories.
Now events and hot topics will not require anyone to write and descriptions, instead, Facebook will dependent mainly on an algorithm to operate the feature. This software will enable the feature to cover a larger scale without any form of personal bias influencing the list of topics in the trending stories.
This change did strike up a lot controversy as it seems like Facebook’s news curators might intentionally overlook some stories from politically conservative outlets. The Social media giant has denied that such things will occur with the features now.
Topics of Stories
People will now be able to see topics of stories and how many people are talking about these stories, instead of just seeing the summaries on the trending list. Users can use their cursors to hover over these topics that will automatically show them a passage from the original news story.
People will still remain involved in the process as they will make sure that the topics are not based on any internet trend, but that they are real-world news.
Facebook has also made certain changes in order to prevent political bias out of the trending stories feature, despite there being no evidence that this was a concern. Instead Facebook found out that the rate of conservative and liberal topics were almost exactly the same on the trending topics list.
Facebook even revised its guideline in order to be clearer about what the change entails so that reviewers got refresher training which highlighted that the approval of content would not be based on politics and certain ideologies.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook is a platform built on ideas and that it will no longer be relying on lists from external websites and other new outlets to tell them which stories are important.
