Facebook Fires Trending Topics Staff; Decision Immediately Backfires

Facebook

Facebook got rid of the human curators for their “trending news” section and then, predictably, had the algorithm shit the bed and surface a fake story:

Facebook cut its Trending Topics team on Friday in favor of employing algorithms to surface news stories on the social networking platform.

Then on Sunday a fake story about Megyn Kelly getting fired by Fox for being a secret liberal showed up among the Trending Topics after getting hundreds of thousands of likes.

The company didn’t take the story down until Monday morning.