The Washington Post tracked Facebook’s “Trending Topics” section for three weeks. They found a bunch of fake and inaccurate stories.
Our results shouldn’t be taken as conclusive: Since Facebook personalizes its trends to each user, and we tracked results only during work hours, there’s no guarantee that we caught every hoax. But the observation that Facebook periodically trends fake news still stands — if anything, we’ve underestimated how often it occurs.
Maybe it’s time to re-think this whole thing, yeah?