As an avid Facebook user, I frequently check the “Trending News” section on the right side of my newsfeed, which lists news stories by keyword. If you see a keyword that interests you, you can hover over it to learn more about the news story. The section also sorts news into categories such as politics, sports, entertainment and science, and ranks news stories by popularity online. The more users there are engaging with a story, the longer it will remain in the section.
At the end of August, Facebook made a big change to its news feature. The company laid off the entire editorial staff in charge of running this section, opting instead to use an algorithm. The algorithm determines what stories are trending on in the online world and lists them in the trending section. Users can hover over the keywords to view headlines featured elsewhere on the Internet, but there are no longer any basic descriptions of the news stories because there are no longer any editors to write them. When the algorithm first came into use, editors still culled the list of trending topics, but Facebook recently announced that going forward, no humans will be involved other than the engineers working on the algorithm.
This change is problematic. As I write this article, the top stories appearing in the Trending News section on my newsfeed are, “YAY! Ranveer Singh to perform with Coldplay in Mumbai” and “LOL!! Steve Harvey meets his lookalike on Family Feud!!” Steve Harvey meeting his lookalike is not news. It does not even qualify as clickbait for anyone except the population that still watches “Family Feud.”
The decision to let an algorithm run the Trending News section came shortly after Facebook was criticized for a supposed bias in the news it featured. There were rumors the news editors purposely suppressed conservative news stories and kept those headlines out of the section. Facebook denied any systematic political bias, but also promised to work on improving the way the section was run. But replacing possibly-biased editors with an algorithm that’s only criteria for what belongs in the Trending News section is popularity is not an improvement. A recent study found that 62 percent of American adults use social media as a news source. When that many people are paying attention to sources like Facebook’s Trending News, the stories they feature matter.
In addition to a wealth of unimportant headlines — like the Steve Harvey one mentioned above — the algorithm Facebook uses has also resulted in fake news stories making it into the Trending News section. Around the anniversary of Sept. 11, the Trending News section featured “September 11th” as a topic, but when users clicked on the topic, it actually led to a hoax article about a 9/11 conspiracy theory. When a common news source used by a large number of people is featuring irrelevant and sometimes incorrect information, that leads to the risk of a misinformed or uninformed public. Particularly in an election year, it is crucial the general public be informed, and not just the ones who watch the news or read the paper every day. The fact is that some voters use social media as their main news source, so it is vital that this news be accurate and relevant.
Facebook does still have engineers working on the algorithm, so perhaps it will prove more successful with more tweaking. But algorithms themselves are not necessarily free from bias. Sometimes they recreate human bias since they are, after all, made by humans. In particular, algorithms like Facebook’s that take into account user activity can end up reflecting human bias. As it stands, Facebook’s Trending News algorithm is insufficient. There ought to be human editors overseeing it, ensuring stories like the ones mentioned in this article don’t make it into the section. If Facebook’s Trending News section was plagued by a strong political bias, they should address that, but an algorithm that prioritizes clickbait over news about what is happening in our country and our world is not the solution.
Nora Walls is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at n.walls@cavalierdaily.com.
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