
Facebook fires human editors, algorithm immediately posts fake news - CodeMage
http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/08/facebook-fires-human-editors-algorithm-immediately-posts-fake-news/
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calbear81
I can see how the logic around this went: There have been some negative press
from folks who worked on the trending team which probably pissed Facebook off.
Theoretically, clicking on a trending topic would bring up the latest news
articles posted and provide additional information/context.

The reality is that I am seeing a lot more tabloid-esque topics that seem like
they might be relevant but are not once I click through.

Yesterday, a trending topic for me was #mcchicken which I thought oh maybe
McDonald's released a new chicken sandwich or some type of food/health news.
Instead, it was trending because some guy basically stuck his penis in a
mcchicken sandwich and posted a video of it. Previously, I would have expected
human editors to either deem this unnewsworthy or at least provide a better
one word description than #mcchicken maybe like #guyhassexwithmcchicken.

Anyways, I'm sure it will get better over time but I am missing the old
module. I thought the descriptions were succinct and well written.

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danso
Maybe they should emphasize that it's merely a trending topic, like hashtags
on Twitter. In some (well, many) cases, cutting a topic because it appears to
be fake only fans the flame that there's a coverup of purportedly real news
(because why would they bother to cover it up, as that logic goes).

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forgottenpass

        Facebook explained that the new, non-human Trending module is 
        personalized "based on a number of factors, including Pages you’ve 
        liked, your location (e.g., home state sports news), the previous 
        trending topics with which you’ve interacted, and what is trending 
        across Facebook overall." 
    

I don't understand how putting their users in an algorithmic echo chamber is a
good idea (not to suggest manually curated the trending news was good either).
There is already enough distortion of the world caused by whatever flavors of
nonsense are popular among a user's set of friends. Why add more?

~~~
paavokoya

      Why add more?
    

Same reason fast food sells. Exploitation of innate sensory pleasure. "I'm
perfectly aligned with my friends and it feels great"

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in_cahoots
This article buries the fact tha there are still engineers looking at the
algorithm's results and making sure they are "tied to a current news event in
the real world". According to Facebook, the editors mainly wrote summaries of
the stories.

Here's the original post: [http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/08/search-fyi-an-
update-to-...](http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/08/search-fyi-an-update-to-
trending/)

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protomyth
That seems to be the way things are going today for automated news. Google
News is posting a headline directly from snopes.com if you search "North
Dakota". The headline is racist in the extreme.

I think some folks need to rethink what is an actual news site, but I expect
the continued tweets about it being Facebook doing some payback to
conservatives. This stuff is very touchy.

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woliveirajr
Well, humans are many times fooled by fake or biased news. Some can be caught
by simple verification or confrontation with other sources. Some require a
deep research or specialized knowledge.

It's not easy to train an algorithm to outperform humans when complex context
is required.

~~~
Jonoco
If they change the algorithm to filter out fake or biased news, they might
alienate their user base.

