Facebook announced Friday will remove its “Trending” topics section, the snafu-plagued module behind the 2016 uproar over the suppression of conservative news.
The feature, introduced in 2014, will be pulled next week and replaced with other venues for news access, with an emphasis on mobile access and video, Alex Hardiman, head of Facebook news products, said in a post.
“From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful,” he said. “We will remove Trending from Facebook next week and we will also remove products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the Trends API.”
The soon-to-debut features include a news video section on Facebook Watch “where people can view live coverage, daily news briefings and weekly deep dives that are exclusive to watch.”
Facebook is also testing a feature that “lets publishers put a ’breaking news’ indicator on their posts in News Feed,” and a dedicated section called “Today In” that links to local publishers, officials and organizations.
The “Trending” section, located in the top right corner of the page, currently provides links to stories on third-party news outlets, primarily newspapers, wire services, magazines and television websites.
One problem is that the feature wasn’t driving much traffic, only accounting for about 1.5 percent of clicks to publishers on average, Mr. Hardiman said.
The section landed in the middle of a brouhaha over bias when Gizmodo reported in May 2016 that Facebook workers were squelching popular reports about conservatives and injecting other stories that wouldn’t qualify for inclusion on their own.
The anti-conservative slant also resulted in fewer links to right-of-center news outlets.
“Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories,” said Gizmodo in the report.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied the allegations but met a week later with a dozen leading conservatives “to talk about how we can make sure Facebook continues to be a platform for all ideas across the political spectrum.”
A few months later, Facebook also fired its trending team in order to rely instead primarily on a computer algorithm, which resulted in its own set of problems, including the posting of a fake story about then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly being fired for supporting Hillary Clinton.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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