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Facebook is updating its “Trending” feature that highlights hot topics on its social networking site, part of an effort to root out the kind of fake news that Critics claim that it helped Donald Trump become president. With the changes announced yesterday, Facebook’s Trending list will include topics covered by multiple publishers. Previously, he focused on articles that drew the largest crowds of people sharing or commenting on posts.
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Will Cathcart, the company’s vice president of product management, said the switch is intended to make Facebook a more reliable source of information by directing its crowd of 1.8 billion users to topics that are “covered by multiple outlets.” reflect real-world events.” blog post.
Facebook will also stop customizing trending lists to meet each user’s personal interests. Instead, everyone in the same region will see the same trending lists, which are currently shown in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and India.
This change can broaden the scope of information for Facebook users, rather than reinforcing topics they’ve already heard or read about elsewhere.
Also Read: Fake News And How It’s Killing Democracy Through Social Media Timelines
A broader perspective may make Facebook users less likely to live in a “filter bubble” engaging only with people and ideas they agree with.
Facebook introduced its Trending List in 2014 in response to the popularity of a similar feature on Twitter, a short messaging service that competes for people’s attention and ad revenue.
Questions about Facebook’s influence on what people read intensified last summer when a technology blog relied on an anonymous source to say that human editors routinely put conservative views on the site. Suppressed approach.
Read more: Facebook announces new measures to curb ‘fake news’ in Germany
Facebook fired the small group of journalists monitoring its trending items and replaced them with an algorithm that was supposed to be a more impartial judge of what to put on the list. .
But it started automatically picking posts that were getting the most attention, even if the information they contained was fake. Some of the fake news targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, prompting critics to believe the falsehoods helped Donald Trump overcome a large deficit in the polls.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially called the idea “crazy,” but in December the company announced several new measures to curb the spread of fake news.
First, to discourage the creation of fake news, Facebook is also removing persistent publishers of misinformation from its lucrative ad network.
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