If you've been looking at your Facebook News Feed carefully over the last few months, you've likely noticed the ever-changing Trending section. There, on the right-hand side of your News Feed, lies some of the most coveted space on the web.
Starting back in 2014, the Trending section became a way for Facebook to deliver interesting, timely content that recently became popular on Facebook. Trending topics appear in five categories: top trends, politics, science and technology, sports and entertainment.
And people used the feature. In fact, 62 percent of U.S. adults get news on social media, found 2016 Pew Research. And 44 percent of those adults get their news specifically on Facebook.
But in the spring of 2016, exactly how Facebook selected those trending stories was called into question. Several former Facebook staffers spoke out in a Gizmodo article. They said their small group of about 12 "chose what's trending. There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn't. It was up to the news curator to decide."
In addition to deciding what to feature, the news curators would also link to a specific news site with the full story. The Trending process was not entirely by an algorithm.
And that was just the beginning. Former members of the team revealed in a follow-up Gizmodo story that the process was "absolutely bias." The article goes so far as to claim that Facebook "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network's influential 'trending' news section."
A controversy was born. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement that they "found no evidence that this report is true." Facebook released more info on how Trending Topics works, but people remained skeptical.
So, in August 2016, Facebook made a change to the Trending feature to make the process more automated. The topics would be chosen based on the number of people posting or sharing that topic. Then, a general topic, like Ellen DeGeneres, could appear in the Trending section. You would then click on the topic and see posts from news sources and individuals alike.
The problem with this version? Fake news began to trend and continued to spread. The proliferation of this fake news and its impact on the presidential election has been widely debated. Clearly, Facebook hadn't gotten its Trending process quite right.
This week, Facebook has released its latest tweaks to the Trending process.
There are three big changes to this new version:
- In addition to a high engagement level on Facebook, the topic must also be posted by multiple publishers and news outlets.
- A headline and media source will again appear under each trending topic. This info will be automatically, not manually, selected based on a few factors.
- Trending topics will no longer be personalized based on individual's interests. Everyone in the same region will see the same Trending topics — plain and simple.
Don't get too comfortable with this Trending version. Facebook's VP of Product Management Will Cathcart said they're "listening to people's feedback and will continue to make improvements in order to provide a valuable Trending experience."
