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Humans will not write Facebook’s trending topic descriptions

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You all must have already witnessed it. Facebook has stopped writing descriptions for its Trending Topics section replacing them with snippets of text pulled from news stories.

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The social networking giant who is yet to fully recover from the allegations of suppressing conservative news content on the site’s Trending Topics section announced that human editors will no longer write the short story descriptions that accompany a trending topic on the site. Instead, Facebook is going to use algorithms to “pull excerpts directly from stories.”

CIOL Humans will not write Facebook’s trending topic descriptions

That, however, doesn’t mean that humans get out of the process completely. Facebook employees will continue to be "involved" in Trending Topics, separating legitimate news events from the mundane hashtags that trend every day. An algorithm will surface popular stories, but Facebook editors will weed out the inappropriate or fake ones. “There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality,” the company’s blog reads.

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"Making these changes to the product allows our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics," the company said in a blog post. "Facebook is a platform for all ideas, and we're committed to maintaining Trending as a way for people to access a breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics."

Facebook says automating story descriptions will help it expand Trending Topics to more countries and languages. But that wasn’t the catalyst here. “This is something we always planned to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year,” the post reads.

The problem with news feeds on public platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat is that they all are walking a fine line between being a neutral platform to host news and a subjective media company that creates it.

If algorithms are human-generated, they are by default biased. News recaps, summaries are all done by human agents and Facebook through its update just seem to be clarifying on the extent of that human involvement.

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