![]() It's being tested out in 30 markets in the U.S. "Breaking news has to look different than a recipe," Hardiman said.Īnother feature, called "Today In," shows people breaking news in their area from local publishers, officials and organizations. The "breaking news" label that Facebook is testing with 80 news publishers around the world will let outlets such as The Washington Post add a red label to indicate that a story is breaking news, highlighting it for users who want accurate information as things are happening. "What they are not doing is giving an overall account of their mission on how these fixes fit together," Pasquale said. The changes and features Facebook is putting out, he said, are being treated as "bug fixes" - addressing single problems the way engineers do. Pasquale said Facebook's new efforts represent "very slow steps" toward an acknowledgement that the company is making editorial judgments when it decides what news should be shown to users - and that it needs to empower journalists and editors to do so.īut what needs to happen now, he added, is a broad shift in the company's corporate culture, recognizing the expertise involved in journalistic judgment. "There are other ways for us to better invest our resources," Hardiman said. Ultimately, Facebook appears to conclude that trying to fix the headaches around trending wasn't worth the meager benefit the company, users and news publishers saw in it. The troubles underscore the difficulty of relying on computers, even artificial intelligence, to make sense of the messy human world without committing obvious, sometimes embarrassing and occasionally disastrous errors. The thinking was that coverage by just one outlet could be a sign that the news is fake. In early 2017, Facebook made another attempt to fix the trending section, this time by including only topics covered by several news publishers. Instead, the software algorithm began to pick out posts that were getting the most attention, even if the information in them was bogus. In late 2016, Facebook fired the human editors who worked on the trending topics and replaced them with software that was supposed to be free of political bias. Yet two years later, Facebook still hasn't been able to shake the notion of bias. Zuckerberg met with prominent right-wing leaders at the company's headquarters in an attempt at damage control. Troubles with the trending section began to emerge in 2016, when the company was accused of bias against conservatives, based on the words of an anonymous former contractor who said Facebook downplayed conservative issues in that feature and promoted liberal causes. adults get some or all of their news through Facebook. But instead of having Facebook's moderators, human or otherwise, make editorial decisions, there's been a subtle shift to let news organizations do so.Īccording to the Pew Research Center, 44 percent of U.S. In an interview ahead of Friday's announcement, Facebook's head of news products, Alex Hardiman, said the company is still committed to breaking and real-time news. By contrast, he said, deciding what news stories should go in "trending" requires broad thinking, quick judgments about context and decisions about whether someone is trying to game the system. He said algorithms are good for very narrow, well-defined tasks. "It's very good to get rid of `trending,"' said Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland and expert on algorithms and society. Facebook also wants to make local news more prominent. Trending news that year included the death of Robin Williams, Ebola and the World Cup.įacebook is now testing new features, including a "breaking news" label that publishers can add to stories to distinguish them from other chatter. elections through social media, as Russia later would be. "Fake news" wasn't yet a popular term, and no foreign country had been accused of trying to influence the U.S. ![]() It fit nicely into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's pledge just a year earlier to make Facebook its users' "personal newspaper."īut that was then. When Facebook launched "trending" in 2014 as a list of headlines to the side of the main news feed, it was a straightforward move to steal users from Twitter by giving them a quick look at the most popular news of the moment. But the trending section also proved problematic in ways that would presage Facebook's later problems with fake news, political balance and the limitations of artificial intelligence in managing the messy human world. The company claims the tool is outdated and wasn't popular.
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