
Removing Trending From Facebook - champagnepapi
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/removing-trending/
======
seibelj
Those “We apologize for fake news” ads on TV and the subway from Facebook seem
really weird to me. Like FB thinks that the reason their numbers are down is
because people are mad about them and some ads saying “we’re sorry” will fix
it. I think Facebook has been supplanted by a variety of better tools, some of
which they themselves created, and it’s now going to be a long term stagnation
and decline

~~~
colordrops
The thing that drove me away from Facebook is not fake news, but that there is
news (and other viral content) at all, fake or not. 90% of my feed is content
about people and events I have no connection to or care for. I thought to
whole point of FB was to connect with people you know.

~~~
d4l3k
The feed thing is pretty easy to fix. You just have to tell Facebook you don't
want to see posts like that (three dot menu). I did that a while back and
don't get any memes or shared links on my feed anymore.

~~~
ckosidows
Just unfollow everybody. Believe me you won't miss your feed.

~~~
meko
I use a stylish plugin which masks the feed entirely. It was useful when I was
having to use facebook often to promote a brand. Nowadays though it's
eliminated the vast majority of facebook's use for me. 95% of my notifications
are random 'so and so invited you to an event' and 'so and so posted in some
group'. I realized that the fb feed had become a content aggregator, much like
that other website we all know and love(?), but instead your f&f were the
contributors. Blacking out the feed of inane content effectively made fb
useless for me.

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hello_1234
Every day or two I see something new about facebook on hackernews front page,
and pretty much all the discussion boils down to "how awful facebook is", "oh,
I quit it five years ago, I don't understand those people who still use it;
oh, they sell our data to generate so much profit". Facebook has more than a
billion active users, and is probably the most used social network in the
world.

I wish hackernews users stop repeating how awful facebook is and rather
provide some constructive criticism.

~~~
cryoshon
see, you snuck in an entirely legitimate and factually true criticism in
there: they sell our data. let's unpack that for a minute so we can put this
"facebook criticisms are unreasonable" meme into its grave.

there's nothing non-constructive about faulting their core business practice
of stealing user data and selling it against their consent and often without
their knowledge whatsoever. nobody would opt into any of it if there was not
the carrot of a social network provided to people well before they understood
the consequences.

criticizing FB in this way is a propositional statement: IF a company sells my
data, THEN that company is undesirable for me to interact with. that is a 100%
actionable piece of information for FB. there is no higher form of
constructive criticism.

FB has all the information about what people don't like. it's their job to
have the information.

they don't care what the users like, is the thing. they don't sell to you, you
are their product.

so yeah, it isn't that the constructive criticism isn't out there. it's that
they rely on not hearing it and not putting it into practice.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
That’s not remotely “factually true”.

Please tell me, where can I buy this user data you speak of? Do you have a
Facebook URL you can share where I can spend money to buy user data?

I’m especially interested in buying _stolen_ user data from Facebook, too.

So please, if you can point me to somewhere that I can buy a giant zip file of
stolen user data from Facebook, that’d be awesome.

I suspect what you actually mean is that I can run ads that are targeted based
on aggregate user data, but that’s not even _remotely_ the same as buying user
data. It’s not even close. I can’t run ads against small audiences either, so
if someone clicks on my ads I know some general stuff about them based on my
campaign targeting, but I’m certainly not getting a data dump about them,
there’s no way for me to identify them, etc.

And none of that targeting data is “stolen”, either. It’s all provided
voluntarily by the user to Facebook in accordance with their privacy policy.

Your contention is probably that people would never provide that data if they
knew it was going to be sold, so it’s basically “stolen”.

My response would be that: a) it isn’t sold, as we established, and b) people
actually don’t care that much about this. If they did, _they’d actually read
the damn privacy policy they agreed to_. But no one does, because they don’t
really care enough to be bothered.

~~~
throwawayg6kx23
It's certainly true that Facebook sells access to user data! Though you're
right there's no API. Facebook doesn't make it easy, the technical
resourcefulness of a grey/black adtech company are required.

Much of this is non-obvious, even to web-savvy technical people.

> I suspect what you actually mean is that I can run ads that are targeted
> based on aggregate user data ... so if someone clicks on my ads I know some
> general stuff about them based on my campaign targeting

> but I’m certainly not getting a data dump about them, there’s no way for me
> to identify them, etc.

An effective way to personally identify someone who follows a link and loads a
page (and nothing else) is through browser fingerprinting [0]. Fingerprinting
is more powerful and ubiquitous than many on this site realize.

So, if a greyhat adtech company has data on a person's browser fingerprint
history, then the Facebook targeting data can be _easily_ associated. Browser
fingerprints should really, REALLY be considered as PII because that is how
they are used.

The data is relatively limited, but invaluable for future ad-targeting off the
Facebook platform. And, if there's already substantial information in the
database on a person, the high quality Facebook data can be used for quality
control for other data sources.

It's a tricky problem for Facebook to solve, but they have zero incentive to
try. So they don't (that I've seen).

...and then there's the data they were selling via the developer interface. If
anyone thinks Cambridge Analytica is the only example of this, I have a
startup to sell them. One might notice that even Facebook is now branding the
CA scandal as a 'breach' rather than 'system operating as expected', because
of this criticism. Facebook may not have sold access directly, but by giving
developers (and dark adtech companies) such unrestricted access to the data,
Facebook pumped up their platform numbers which had a relative positive effect
on the company's share price.

This has all been conscious on the part of Facebook leadership -- there's
enough smart people at Facebook, you can bet some of them raised red flags
over the years.

[0] [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/02/now-s...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/02/now-sites-can-fingerprint-you-online-even-when-you-use-
multiple-browsers/)

------
IronWolve
People think if they can control facebook, they can swing elections. Hillary
just recently made that comment if she controlled facebook.

Look how Yahoo news and Google news pushes editorial pieces above news, almost
like an agenda. Same thing was happening with facebook.

~~~
freehunter
It seriously annoys me how major publications have editorial content on their
main domain, on their main site, with the same template. Sure, it says
"editorial" below the headline, but at first glance it looks like news.
Washington Post, NYT, etc all put the full weight of their name behind content
that's literally just a random blog from some random person with no fact-
checking.

If I see a headline on HN or Reddit or Facebook that says "'Giant Meteor
Likely to Impact Earth' \- NYTimes.com", how do I know if that's an impending
disaster or just someone saying "NASA says it's theoretically possible"? The
only way is to click the article and look for the "editorial" line, at which
point the newspaper has already won.

~~~
pofilat
WaPo has 3 Opinion sections, only one of which they label "Opinion"
([https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/))

The have /news/the-fix", something they call "Analysis", where they mix fact
and editorialism [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-
fix/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/)

and they have "Perspectives", also filed under /news

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/)

------
lacker
It was a constant source of bad publicity when offensive things would hit
Trending. Once Facebook conceded that manual curation would be necessary, it
was just a matter of time before they deemed it not worth the cost.

------
politician
All you need to know here is that where Trending is algorithmic, Breaking News
is a flag set by a trusted set of content providers. On the plus side, this
simplification should allow Facebook better control of how to steer its users
towards revenue generating content.

~~~
ams6110
Won't those providers be tempted to set the "breaking news" flag on every
post, just like they do on their TV news channels?

~~~
gowld
Sure, but they might lose their privileges if FB doesn't like their choices.

------
lostmsu
We already did it for you with a custom uBlock rule, thank you.

~~~
TheCapn
I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull apart the div element and replace it
with a random image from an imgur subreddit gallery*. I'm certain far better
javascript programmers could take this and improve on it. Calling myself a
novice would be embellishing my skills.

[https://gist.github.com/GrahamBlanshard/d7211436088e0159164a](https://gist.github.com/GrahamBlanshard/d7211436088e0159164a)

I heard it conflicts in ways with the facebook chat sidebar which I never use,
so if you're interesting in fiddling around with that on GreaseMonkey or
TamperMonkey just keep that sort of thing in mind.

EDIT: Example of what it does on the sidebar for you:
[https://i.imgur.com/Yqc2jdY.png](https://i.imgur.com/Yqc2jdY.png)

------
jasaloo
This move comes two weeks after they announce a new strategy to fight against
"misinformation and foreign interference," namely, by partnering with the
Atlantic Council, a think tank heavily funded by NATO allies, gulf states, and
weapons contractors. While Facebook was never really the democratic
information platform everyone assumed to be, this move seems like a death
blow. Does anyone else view it that way?

------
amelius
Please remove everything except Events.

------
samspenc
This was interesting: "However, it was only available in five countries and
accounted for less than 1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average. From
research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less
useful. "

I've found it to be somewhat useful on Facebook - and LinkedIn has a very
similar feature as well. I wonder if the clickthroughs on LinkedIn are
somewhat similar.

------
jl2718
Facebook is now a newsertainment media platform. Same playbook as LinkedIn.

Neither have anything to do with ‘connecting people’ anymore.

I don’t get it. News media is dying. Why would you want to copy them? How is
this profitable?

------
ybrah
When I used to use Facebook, I had it filtered because I avoid any targeted
news headlines. I think targeted news headlines are dangerous because they can
be used as propaganda devices.

------
remarkEon
>However, it was only available in five countries and accounted for less than
1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average.

"on average"

------
LUmBULtERA
Don’t you think Facebook looks tired?

~~~
giancarlostoro
"Doctor! What did you say? Doctor!!!"

Amazing how the rumor spread from 1 person. Fiction I know but still amazing.

------
Twirrim
> and increasingly through news video

Well, yes, because Facebook's timeline is optimised to surface videos over
other content. If you priorities one type of content, it's no wonder it
becomes what people consume the most.

------
jds375
They seem to suggest that it is being removed because it wasn’t being used.
Does anyone else find that hard to believe? Obviously it’s totally antectodal,
but I checked that EVERY time I logged onto Facebook.

Just because people don’t click on it doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t read
it.... Afterall it’s visible right in the top right of the site. To be honest
this kind of sounds like Facebook is trying to skirt around the real reason
for removing it (it was contributing to promoting fake news).

Does anyone know if all of the trending items were reviewed by editors? If so,
then I’d be more inclined to believe their explanation

~~~
qop
Yeah, they want it gone because people are making a stink about the
agendization of what news is shown on the feed.

I'd like to see trending reflect my geographical trends more than anything.
What are my hometown friends talking about, and that sort of thing.

I don't give a shit about what the average person talks or thinks about,
that's the whole point of only having my friends on facebook, or so I thought.
Turns out I am supposed to read fake news, click ads, and shut up.

------
Elect2
Since it only includes a link and summary, no value added, why not submit
original link? [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/removing-
trending/](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/removing-trending/)

~~~
jawilson2
Kind of unrelated: when I click this link in Firefox, it seems to erase the
history for the current tab, and the back button doesn't work. It looks like
it works in Chrome though. What is going on?

~~~
zentiggr
Firefox's Facebook Container. Segregate any FB url from the rest of the
browser state to minimize tracking etc.

------
dang
Url changed from
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-01/facebook-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-01/facebook-
says-it-s-removing-trending-feature), which points to this.

