Facebook fired editors - and the algorithm went astray

The “Popular News” selection module in Facebook news feed is very tricky. “The list of topics is personalized based on various factors, including your“ Like ”marks for Pages, your location and news that is popular throughout the Facebook site,” the help center said . To date, the "Popular" section with a list of popular topics (Trending Topics) is available only in English in some countries.

Historically, the editors department worked on Facebook, which moderated the list of popular news, because viral and fake news with unverified sources are often distributed on the social network. Editors removed fakes and added materials from reliable sources to the list. It was assumed that the choice of editors will also help train the algorithm. Human moderation did not cause any special complaints until the election campaign began in the United States before the presidential election. And a famous politician didn’t come on the scene - the perfect generator of viral news.

Viral news and fakes. One marketer + two copywriters = $ 30,000 per month

Almost all the loud statements of the candidate from the Republican Party became viral news and were abundantly quoted in social media. Some call him a "political troll." However, this behavior is already becoming normal for modern politicians, including European and Russian . Moreover, many unverified news related to this name were also scandalous and widely diverged on the social network.
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The work of the Facebook editors group is to remove such unverified news, and it is only natural that the Republican candidate became the main victim of their censorship. In May 2016, a big scandal broke out because of this - Facebook was accused of political censorship and attempts to influence public opinion by manipulating the selection of “popular news”, from which it was most often removed popular news related to Donald Trump.

Content generators that specialize in the distribution of fake and viral news, specializing in Donald Trump, have been particularly affected. The NY Times recently published a large article on how such content farms work. For example, a 35-year-old internet marketer from St. Louis, Adam Nicoloff, opened a website and page Make America Great on Facebook a year ago where he publishes hot viral news in support of Trump (about 20 pieces a day). For example, “I will never send my children to a school where children are brainwashed by the LGBT lobby.” He hired two editors from the Philippines (husband and wife) who do all the work. Hot political topics diverge well on the social network, and over the past month, the site has brought the marketer more than $ 30,000 in advertising revenue. Unfortunately for a marketer, after an article in the NY Times, his Facebook page was blocked. But his business lives on, and many unscrupulous journalists and marketers continue to throw viral and fake news on Facebook, counting on thousands of likes, reposts and visitors.

Such news was often put on the Popular list, and editors deleted it . But in May, they were criticized by the media because of accusations of political censorship - they really removed a lot of news about Donald Trump, like the one mentioned above.

Facebook lawyers even had to come to the US Senate for an explanation , where they reported on the work of their algorithm and the actions of the editors. Facebook representatives said that the investigation "did not reveal evidence of systematic political discrimination in the selection or promotion of the stories included in the popular news block."

Goodbye, editors!

Facebook was forced to take action due to public outrage. On August 26, Facebook announced that the list of popular news would now be formed almost completely algorithmically again, with only minimal supervision of the editors. The company mentioned that the new system will scale up the work of this module and in the future run it in more countries and in more languages. With editorial work this would be almost impossible.

In connection with this, the appearance of the popular news module has changed. In the block “Popular” there is no longer a short description for each news. Now there is a reader can not immediately understand what, in fact, the news.



By clicking on the news is displayed a snippet from the original text, and not the original editorial description.



As before, the list is compiled by the number of references to the topic and repost, taking into account the likes of a particular user and his location. Editors' participation is minimized. They simply remove from the list topics that are not tied to a specific event. For example, the hashtag #lunch, which appears in the list of the most popular topics daily at lunchtime.

The head of the News Feed development group at Facebook, Will Cathcart, stressed that the company is absolutely not interested in pursuing any editorial policy and "spreading the editors' subjective choice to the whole world."

“Our goal is to give the opportunity to get acquainted with popular topics to as many people as possible, which will be difficult if we rely only on summarizing topics manually,” Facebook said in an official statement .

The Trending Team employed 40-50 editors with salaries ranging from $ 55,000 to $ 65,000 per year — more than most journalists in traditional media receive.

The department had a high staff turnover — those editors whose news choices showed low rates received a warning from the supervisor. He sent statistics and compared the indicators of that editor with the higher rates of other editors. According to the rules for checking information, a list of 10 reliable news sources was established, but on the whole, the rules for editors were extremely vague (see Trending Review Guidelines ). Topics were selected from a list of 1000 RSS feeds of news media .

So, after the May scandal with the editors decided to end. According to unofficial information , editors from the Trending Team department were fired without warning immediately after the meeting, where they were invited along with a security officer.

The editors were given a four-week severance pay.

First results

Immediately after the removal of people from editing the list of "Popular News" algorithm proved itself in all its glory. Literally a few hours later, a political article about Megin Kelly ( archived copy ) got into the list of popular topics - a completely made-up story about a lawyer and TV anchor of Fox News, which political tabloid End The Fed , another garbage media that earns on publishing viral news in support of Donald Trump, specifically designed for distribution in social networks.

In the best traditions of the garbage media publication refers to a source on the site "End The Fed". She refers to "National Insider Politics", and the latter, in turn, to the very dubious blog-source "Conservative101".

In a few hours, the fake post scored about 1900 likes on Facebook, 59,000 mentions - and made it to the list of popular news.



The article was in the list of popular for several hours, until Facebook deleted it on Monday morning .

Further more.

Soon some very strange topics were added to the list of popular news. "Strange" - to put it mildly. One of the headlines of "SNL Star Calls Ann Coulter a Racist C * nt" included offensive language.



Another topic is a viral video of a person who performs an indecent act with a McCiechen sandwich.



Well, what, the theme is really tied to an event in the real world. The topic is popular, they talk about it. Why not? Maybe editors are really not needed?

They say that with time the algorithm will learn - and the personalized tape of “popular news” will better take into account the interests of specific users. Then the news about the Makchiken sandwich will be included in the list of popular news only for those who are really interested. Although, why deceive yourself - it is really interesting to most users in the social network Facebook.