Facebook fires its editorial team which was responsible for writing descriptions in the Trending section. According to the sources, the editorial team was alerted at 4 PM and were asked to leave the premises by 5 PM. Some of the team members were working with Facebook for more than a year now; however, they were given pay till September 1, and two weeks, additionally.
Now, the topics in the Trending section will now be appearing as a single word or short phase. For this Facebook has computer algorithm to generate the buzz. The Trending Topics will now determine which stories to showcase based on the number of mentions and the increase in the number of mentions over a period of time. Its Facebook’s one of many ways to deploy machine intelligence to know how netizens uses the platform.
The Previous and The New Version
The team will be staffed solely by engineers will work to check whether the articles and topics featured by the algorithm are newsworthy or not.
Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s VP for Global Operations, said, “Topics that are eligible to appear in the product are surfaced by our algorithms, not people.”
Facebook’s increased confidence on automation shows that the company’s growing trust in machine intelligence. However, even machines might fail to recover few of the most basis problems which humans face, such as operating fairly in the face of embedded bias.
With people considering social media as a great source of latest news, it’s highly important for Facebook to get the things right.