Trending topics on Facebook is all about anything "hot" and "breaking". Facebook and Twitter are both having it, but no matter how similar their own versions are, Facebook's is more complicated.
On August 26th, 2016, Facebook announced a change to its trending topics. At first, nothing much has changed. Facebook's trending topics works by gathering popular things around the social media. Digging it a little deeper, Facebook has redesigned it to be cleaner and simpler. Facebook eliminated the explanatory description and replaced it with the number of people that are talking about that particular topic. Users can hover on their desired topic, or just hover on it.
And as for added tweak, "a search results page will include the news sources that are covering it, posts discussing it and an automatically selected original news story with an excerpt pulled directly from the top article itself."
By making it cleaner, Facebook's trending topics looks similar to Twitter's. With only the topics that are trending listed, it's having less clutter and encourage more engagement.
Facebook changed how the trending topics look and feel in order to "increase the scalability and personalization of the product." The simpler feature at the frontend also highlights a more sophisticated backend: trending topics is now more algorithms that it is human curated. This way, Facebook can cover more topics in its trending list every day. It will also make things easier for the social giant to roll out the feature to more countries, especially when translating brief descriptions to other languages will no longer be an issue.
Facebook said that it wanted to remove humans from the trending process as much as possible, and the process were accelerated after the announcement. "We are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year," the company explained.
The update isn't going to affect how it is supposed to do its job. The change is all about Facebook in going forward.
What's behind Facebook is human power aided with an arsenal of algorithms and hardware. When one changes, that thing may tip the scale. That comes to a realization when three days after the announcement, the more focused algorithm-powered trending topic is making its first (huge) mistake.
On August 29th, 2016, the company trended a fake news story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. The algorithm chose a very bad, factually incorrect headline to explain to its users.
The headline was visible to anyone who hovered over Kelly's name on the trending list. The algorithms refer the Fox News anchor as a "traitor" and claims that the cable channel has "Kick[ed] her out for backing Hillary."
The fake and controversial article was featured prominently a the top news story on Facebook, above Beyoncé’s VMA performance and Anthony Weiner's sexting scandal. Her name disappeared not long afterwards.
Algorithms in powering internet services and features aren't anything new. As for Facebook, it's decision to eliminate human curators is because it considers the combination of volume and momentum. By using algorithms, the social giant can focus its resources into something else
Trending topics is one of the features that is having a spike in mentions. Having computers to do the job, Facebook wants to rest easy. But depending on computers to do a human's job, still have flaws.
The bad Ending The Fed for Kelly is supposed to be an "automatically selected original news story with an excerpt pulled directly from the top article itself," according to Facebook's own announcement about the new trending process.
The article about Kelly is basically just a block of quote taken from National Insider Politics. The original article itself was actually aggregated from a third conservative site, Conservative 101. The article is three paragraphs long, and basically reads as anti-Kelly fan fiction accusing her of being a "closet liberal" who is about to be removed from the network by a Trump-supporting O’Reilly.
All article posts were using the same "BREAKING" headline.
Here, Facebook's trending topics as one of the credible, has turned itself into a fake story creator, thanks to is algorithms. But before accusing, the matter is actually easy to spoof.
Facebook's algorithm for trending topics depends on the number of articles and posts (high volume of mentions and a sharp increase in mentions over a short period of time). This method makes it vulnerable to mistakes, so fake and viral headline can indeed get through. Kelly's story here was promoted to Facebook's trending topics because it initially met the conditions for acceptance at the time, according to Facebook's review guidelines. However, on re-review, Facebook realized that the topic was inaccurate before removing it.