
Facebook Tweaks Its 'Trending Topics' Algorithm to Better Reflect Real News - lizardFiend
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/01/25/511641939/facebook-tweaks-its-trending-topics-algorithm-to-better-reflect-real-news
======
tonto
This trending topics is pure clickbait. Just like yahoo.com trending topics.
Kill it [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-trending-
fa...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/remove-trending-
facebook/kajpcekiminhhkgnhmkjmpmmkjpegjlb?hl=en)

~~~
RileyKyeden
You can do this with uBlock Origin and avoid installing an extra extension.

~~~
aphextron
Yep. I block pretty much all of Facebook besides the chat functionality at
this point.

~~~
gcr
If you only want chat, there's always
[http://messenger.com](http://messenger.com) :-)

~~~
aarongolliver
They just started embedding adds into messenger too (thankfully not in the US,
yet)

~~~
gcr
...Eww... What do these ads look like?

------
decasteve
It's amazing how pleasant the Internet can be when you cut out Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Google/YouTube, et al. "Social Media" has become a
cesspool.

I stick to the my trade (tech) and hobby related sites. Political discourse
creeps in occasionally but for the most part the discussion is more
constructive.

~~~
robertk
Conversely, I was off all social media for 5 years and it's surprising how
pleasant life can be when you re-introduce FB, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. I no
longer have to fill in someone when we grab a coffee, there's a lot more
shared subtext and inside jokes right off the bat. More emotional growth.

I've been using FB to develop a good troll sense / wit & humor bone. For
example:

I was dancing salsa but then I stopped because it's weird being a taco sauce
and moving your hips at the same time.

Surprising how quickly you calibrate to what's actually funny by using likes
as the loss function.

~~~
CaptSpify
This highlights something I think a lot of people sometimes forget: Social
Media is efficient! It's easier for me to write out a story once, and post it
so others can see, than it is for me to tell the story anew each time I meet
up with someone. It's also easier for me to keep up with what's going on with
distant relatives, who I normally wouldn't talk to.

As a privacy enthusiast, I dislike Social Media and wish we went back to
things like blogs, but I get how, for most people, social media is the quick
and simple way to get this done.

~~~
robertk
That's exactly right! The first 5-10 times an interesting story is fun to tell
but eventually it sinks into your bones and it becomes a performance, even
robotic. Better to share the general picture once and discuss the details that
are relevant to your mutual friendship and unique to each conversation.

Another aspect to fighting the "waste of time"ness or politics nature is to
just treat social media like a game / party that teaches you how to be a
funnier and better human being. Here is one of my recent posts:

>>> In case you haven't noticed I'm trying the whole active social media thing
after 5 years of blackout.. I will probably hate it and myself shortly but in
the meantime feel free to grab your slapping gloves if I say something dumb or
emo... and use them to smack yourself in the face. Seriously I know where your
thought was going, why would you slap someone for something they said on the
internet? You should be ashamed of yourself, sit in that corner with a dunce
hat. I will probably join you in a sec

Followed by several days of troll statuses followed by:

>>> In case you haven't caught on I'm treating FB like a giant indefinite
party and going around trolling every one of you. If that's a problem it's a
good thing literally all of my closest friends aren't on here so I don't care
if all you beautiful f __*ers defriend me (3 already have but 4 added me so
shh bb is ok). Oh wait. You 're reading this. On FB. I didn't mean to
insinuate that you aren't special to me. I uhh.. love you? I'll buy ya flowers
(flower emoji) friends? (bear emoji)

------
sverige
It has always been interesting to me that so many people allow Facebook to be
the main curator of their news, though I suppose it's no different than people
allowing network news or one newspaper to be the gatekeeper. I suppose it's
human nature to take the path of least resistance.

~~~
tbrock
A newspaper at least might have some sort of moral obligation to tell the
truth.

However the masses of Facebook have no such obligation.

~~~
camus2
> A newspaper at least might have some sort of moral obligation to tell the
> truth.

Very few people read newspapers. And even then, newspapers aren't news anymore
either, it's entertainment, using emotion to deliver "news", not facts nor
reason. It's all about getting the audience "triggered".

This whole "fake news" thing is so hypocrite, what "trusted" news don't
understand is that they lied so much in the past people stopped trusting them.
That's why people check "alternative news sources". Main stream media needs to
stop taking readers trust for granted, and ask themselves why they lost that
trust at first place.

~~~
matt4077
Would you kindly point me to a lie anywhere on the current front pages of the
New York Times, Guardian, Atlantic, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, or
Economist?

~~~
facetube
More specifically: point us to a lie of the kind of severity that
[http://usainfonews.com](http://usainfonews.com) and
[http://usapoliticszone.com](http://usapoliticszone.com) peddle. Do a WHOIS on
those sites or visit them in a sandbox; they're Macedonian in origin,
demonstrably falsified, and have been spotted in the wild on Facebook.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
what does the phrase "Macedonian in origin" mean? I googled that and google is
telling me about the historical origins of Macedonia. Are you making up that
phrase? Are your trying to imply that the sources are ancient from a long time
ago? Or do you mean they have "questionable" origins. If so, just say
"questionable origins".

~~~
burkaman
Macedonia is still around, that's a literal phrase. I don't know how you would
tell from WHOIS, but apparently a lot of people in Macedonia are responsible
for the most egregious fake news sites:
[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38168281](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-38168281)

~~~
facetube
Here's what I get from `whois usapoliticszone.com`. It's possible that the
information is falsified, but it's hard to understand why a legitimate well-
researched news site would list an individual in Macedonia with ICANN when
they registered a domain:

Domain Name: usapoliticszone.com

Registry Domain ID: 2060737897_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN

Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.godaddy.com

Registrar URL: [http://www.godaddy.com](http://www.godaddy.com)

Update Date: 2016-09-20T18:54:39Z

Creation Date: 2016-09-20T18:54:39Z

Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2017-09-20T18:54:39Z

Registrar: GoDaddy.com, LLC

Registrar IANA ID: 146

Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@godaddy.com

Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4806242505

Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
[http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited](http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited)

Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited
[http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited](http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited)

Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited
[http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited](http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited)

Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited
[http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited](http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited)

Registry Registrant ID: Not Available From Registry

Registrant Name: Angelina Gjorgjievska

Registrant Organization:

Registrant Street: Vera Ciriviri 177

Registrant City: Veles

Registrant State/Province: Macedonia, Veles

Registrant Postal Code: 1400

Registrant Country: MK

Registrant Phone: +389.78459172

Registrant Phone Ext:

Registrant Fax:

Registrant Fax Ext:

Registrant Email: healthyclub247@gmail.com

------
_rpd
> As of Wednesday, the company has once again changed its trending algorithms.
> Personal preferences are now out of the equation. "Facebook will no longer
> be personalized based on someone's interests," Facebook says in a press
> release. "Everyone in the same region will see the same topics." For now, a
> region is considered a country, so everyone in the U.S. should see the same
> topics.

Facebook dropping personalization of news. I'm really surprised.

~~~
Applejinx
They've figured out that Cambridge Analytica used it as an exploit to swing
the Presidential election in the USA, and they're panicking (rightly):
[https://antidotezine.com/2017/01/22/trump-knows-
you/](https://antidotezine.com/2017/01/22/trump-knows-you/)

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Yeesh. I've seen the company discussed but hadn't really looked into what they
were doing differently than other data-driven campaigns in recent years:

> Trump’s conspicuous contradictions and his oft-criticized habit of staking
> out multiple positions on a single issue result in a gigantic number of
> resulting messaging options that creates a huge advantage for a firm like
> Cambridge Analytica: for every voter, a different message. Mathematician
> Cathy O’Neil had already observed in August that “Trump is like a machine
> learning algorithm” that adjusts to public reactions. “Pretty much every
> message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix explained to Das
> Magazin. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and
> Clinton, Trump’s team blasted out 175,000 distinct test variations on his
> arguments, mostly via Facebook. The messages varied mostly in their
> microscopic details, in order to communicate optimally with their
> recipients: different titles, colors, subtitles, with different images or
> videos. The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to
> tiny target groups, Nix told Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or
> apartment buildings. Even individual people.”

> In the Miami neighborhood of Little Haiti, Trump’s campaign regaled
> residents with messages about the failures of the Clinton Foundation after
> the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, in order to dissuade them from turning out for
> Clinton. This was one of the goals: to get potential but wavering Clinton
> voters—skeptical leftists, African-Americans, young women—to stay home. To
> “suppress” their votes, as one Trump campaign staffer bluntly put it. In
> these so-called dark posts (paid Facebook ads which appear in the timelines
> only of users with a particular suitable personality profile), African-
> Americans, for example, were shown the nineties-era video of Hillary Clinton
> referring to black youth as “super predators.”

~~~
leereeves
In 2008 and 2012, Obama pioneered the use of A/B testing to refine campaign
messages. "175,000 distinct test variations" sounds like a more ambitious
effort at the same strategy.

And targeting relevant information at wavering voters seems like a common
strategy in 2016. House of Cards had both fictional Presidential candidates
doing something similar in their fictional election, and Bloomberg once wrote
"[Hillary's] campaign is looking to build on the digital engagement strategy
devised by the Obama team, customizing the messages e-mailed to the estimated
8.6 million people on its list to make them as personal as possible."

~~~
humanrebar
Yeah, these tactics are nothing new. It's not like older techniques like get-
out-the-vote buses were careful to be bipartisan. As long as Americans are
resolute in their opinions and uninterested in facts and open discourse,
campaigns will be focusing of scaring them into turning out or disgusting them
so they stay home.

------
baddox
Am I the only one to have never seen (as best as I can tell) fake news on
Facebook's trending topics? I don't think it's just a matter of them
personalizing it to me, because I get all sorts of celebrity and sports news
that I presume is accurate but in which I have absolutely no interest.

~~~
0xfeba
The fake news was targeted mostly at poor, white, republican/conservatives.

~~~
CaptSpify
source?

~~~
0xfeba
[http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/02/politics/russia-fake-
news-...](http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/02/politics/russia-fake-news-
reality/)

[http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-
russ...](http://warontherocks.com/2016/11/trolling-for-trump-how-russia-is-
trying-to-destroy-our-democracy/)

And by matter of filter bubble. The people the news (mostly negative pieces
about Obama or Clinton) was likely to show up for were white conservatives.

------
wtf_is_up
This week David Brock was trying to raise money from donors for a new CTR type
operation where he claims to have an agreement with Facebook to fight fake
news. [1]

Direct link to his pitch book: [http://freebeacon.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/media-matte...](http://freebeacon.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/media-matters-donor-pitch.pdf)

[1]: [http://freebeacon.com/politics/media-matters-says-
secretly-w...](http://freebeacon.com/politics/media-matters-says-secretly-
working-facebook-fight-fake-news/)

------
panic
Facebook needs to accept that they're a news site and hire some editors. The
first trending topic on my Facebook page is about an Indian cricket player
preparing for his opening match. This hardly seems like the most important
news in the US right now.

~~~
alanh
Are you Panic as in the Panic of Portland software development?

~~~
panic
No, I'm not that Panic (lots of respect for them though).

------
kristianc
This looks like classic hedging behaviour. A Zuckerberg run for office is
looking more and more likely, and when he's running for Pres he won't want to
face awkward questions about what did or didn't show up in the Trending
algorithm.

~~~
iamdave
This is no less than the third time I've seen reference to a Zuckerberg
political run on HN, a theory I've not seen presented _anywhere_ else but HN,
what is this based on and why should I take it seriously?

Uninformed looking to get educated here so please don't take my terse inquiry
for snark.

~~~
underwater
It wouldn't surprise me. He's a smart and highly motivated and seems genuinely
dedicated to improving the world. However he doesn't come across as relatable.
People don't trust him and he's not a great public speaker.

~~~
ethbro
_> However he doesn't come across as relatable. People don't trust him and
he's not a great public speaker._

Yeah, that didn't work out so well for the last person like that who tried to
run for President.

------
nxc18
Why didn't they just keep the news editors they started with? It seems
completely rational to keep news editors on staff to run a news service.

Think about how much in this world would be different if tending news was
rebranded rather than replaced with what they ended up putting out.

~~~
StreamBright
Because they were politically biased?

~~~
lawless123
That is what InforWars and Brietbart claimed.

~~~
StreamBright
Nope, this is what people said who were on such teams before.

[http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-
supp...](http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-
conser-1775461006)

------
junkymunky
This wont make much difference and its kinda cynical as Facebook do very
little to explain how their real targeted messaging ( adverts ) can be
exploited.

Other posters are correct, this is nothing new - organisations like Cambridge
Analytica don't rely on trending.. They advertise directly to custom
audiences, with massive A/B/C etc tested dark post campaigns ( which appear
right in the users timeline not on the side). These are targeted directly at
particular groups of people with specific messaging to activate them. Its
often a very different message for different targets.

To avoid this kind of manipulation, Facebook, just like any ad targeting
platform, would need to change its business model completely. Facebook runs
off targeted ads.

Everyone in advertising who knows what they are doing uses these techniques
now, as well as many startups who use it to drive cheap traffic through their
platforms to enhance their user metrics and learn how to activate users. To be
successful you need to poke away at the target users psychological triggers.
I've done it .. its not rocket science - its just a morally questionable,
scummy thing to do.

Additionally, the technology sector loves the idea of following user behaviour
through analytics. Product development tightly following user behaviour
metrics is a cornerstone of a lot of startup strategies. I think its quite
rare that startups, especially at early stages, even pause to think about the
implications of feature design decisions they make - they are simply trying to
create user growth in any way possible. Once those features become successful,
they are impossible to remove, because investors ( and users ) often view it
as intentional sabotage of a successful product.

A significant problem now is that the messaging techniques which the right are
using are cheap and effective - so they can activate more people for their
bucks. They are morally uninhibited enough to appeal peoples basest fears and
instincts - psychological manipulation to control their vote. The centre and
left are hamstrung because doing that is less compatible with their ethical
position. Combined with this - their audience is more expensive to reach as
their messaging is less reactionary.

An even wider question is that if news organisations whose business model
relies on targeted advertising, and is often targeted itself in its messaging,
is ever going to be factual investigative journalism at all. Actually finding
news which doesn't fall into that category in some way is becoming practically
impossible now, and state funded organisations of course also have their own
problems.

~~~
facetube
Glad to see a mention of Cambridge Analytica here. More interesting angles re:
tested dark post campaigns: KONY 2012, Jade Helm, and the Columbia Chemical
"leak". For KONY 2012, there are allegations that OpenOrd was used to maximize
the total reach of the campaign [1].

1:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/05/suspici...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/04/05/suspicious-
sequel-the-social-flow-of-kony-2012-is-not-what-you-first-thought/)

------
devonharvey
"the proof will be what happens in the real world of people's Facebook pages."

Hard to say that last phrase with a straight face.

------
te_platt
I sure miss the good old days where if you read it on the internet you KNEW it
was true...

~~~
zyxzkz
Back in the good 'ol days of alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork

------
austinjp
The "science and technology" section of the trending news panel is nearly
always empty, or has just one story.

Presumably with this homogenisation of content, this is the same for everyone
else?

~~~
vanderZwan
WTH, that would suggest they have one big list of trending topics, and then
sort by category. Which sounds ridiculous, if I'm interested in science, I
don't care how popular it is relative to a trending story about sports. Why
wouldn't they create a list of most shared articles _per category_ and then
show the top stories in each?

(For some reason Facebook doesn't show me the trending topics, even if I turn
my ad-blocker off, so I can neither confirm or deny your suspicions, sadly)

------
toodlebunions
Hard to imagine getting your news from Facebook.

If you want to be better informed, read a paper or two.

~~~
lazzlazzlazz
The papers publish online content that ends up on Facebook.

~~~
gdulli
But those links are put right next to Breitbart, the Macedonian Times, etc.
and someone who's undiscerning will consider them all equally legitimate.

~~~
visarga
It's simple, go on Chinese and Russian sites for US news, and vice versa.

------
Kiro
As usual a lot of negativity and not a single positive comment about something
that, in my opinion, is a good move.

------
general_ai
So I hope HuffPo won't show up now? Right? It's almost entirely "fake news"
(Breitbart has much to learn), yet it's in the trends and on Google News.

