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In
this May 16, 2012 photo, the Facebook logo is displayed on an iPad in
Philadelphia. Facebook is updating its "trending" feature, which
shows popular topics discussed and shared on its site, in an effort to root out
fake news and misinformation. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
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Facebook is updating its
"trending" feature that highlights hot topics on its social
networking site, part of its effort to root out the kind of fake news stories
that critics contend helped Donald Trump become president.
Associated
Press report continues:
With
the changes announced Wednesday, Facebook's trending list will consist of
topics being covered by several publishers. Before, it focused on subjects
drawing the biggest crowds of people sharing or commenting on posts.
The
switch is intended to make Facebook a more credible source of information by
steering hordes of its 1.8 billion users toward topics that "reflect real
world events being covered by multiple outlets," Will Cathcart, the
company's vice president of product management, said in a blog post.
Facebook
also will stop customizing trending lists to cater to each user's personal
interests. Instead, everyone located in the same region will see the same
trending lists, which currently appear in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia and
India.
That
change could widen the scope of information Facebook's users see, instead of
just topics that reinforce what they may have already heard or read elsewhere.
The broader perspective might reduce the chances of Facebook's users living in
a "filter bubble" — only engaging with people and ideas with which
they agree.
Facebook
introduced its trending list in 2014 in response to the popularity of a similar
feature on Twitter, the short-messaging service that competes for people's
attention and advertising revenue.
Questions
about Facebook's influence on what people are reading intensified last summer
after a technology blog relying on an anonymous source reported that human
editors routinely suppressed conservative viewpoints on the site.
Facebook
fired the small group of journalists overseeing its trending items and replaced
them with an algorithm that was supposed to be a more neutral judge about what
to put on the list.
But
the automated approach began to pick out posts that were getting the most
attention, even if the information in them was bogus. Some of the fake news
stories targeted Democratic presidential nominee Hilary Clinton, prompting
critics to believe the falsehoods help Donald Trump overcome a large deficit in
public opinion polls.
Facebook
CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially brushed off that notion as "crazy," but
in December the company announced a slew of new measures to curb the spread of
fake news.
To
discourage the creation of fake news in the first place, Facebook also is
banishing perpetual publishers of false information from its lucrative ad
network.
Google, which operates an even larger digital ad network, has taken a similar stand against publishers of fake news. In a report released Wednesday, Google said it had exiled about 200 publishers from its AdSense network for various misrepresentations as part of a review conducted during the six weeks of last year.
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