The feed of trending stories surfaced by the algorithm, meanwhile, was “not ready for human consumption-you really needed someone to sift through the junk. But the improvements focused on the content management system and the curation guidelines the humans worked with. The system was constantly being refined, the former contractor added, by Facebook engineers with whom the trending contractors had no direct contact. “I didn’t notice a change at all,” said one, who had worked on the team for close to a year. The strange thing, they told me, was the algorithm didn’t seem to be getting much better at selecting relevant stories or reliable news sources. They also understood that the internal software that identified topics for trending news was meant to improve over time, so it could eventually take on more of the work itself. (They spoke separately and on condition of anonymity, citing a nondisclosure agreement, but they agreed on multiple key points and details.) The former contractors said they weren’t told much about their role or the future of the product they were working on, but the companies that hired them-one an Indiana-based consultancy called BCforward, the other a Texas firm called MMC-did indicate their jobs were not permanent. That all made sense to the three former trending news contractors who spoke with Slate. Articles, Photos, Videos, most frequently read by NDTV readers, most popular articles and. But all three said independently that they were shocked to have been let go so soon, because the software that was meant to supplant them was nowhere near ready. NDTV.COM Trending & Latest News Find Most Trending topics, News Articles, videos, and viral Stories. Three of the trending team members who were recently fired told Slate they understood from the start that Facebook’s ultimate goal was to automate the process of selecting stories for the trending news section. But in its haste to mollify conservatives, the company appears to have rolled out a new product that members of its own trending news team viewed as seriously flawed. That same day, Facebook announced an “update” to its trending section-a feature that highlights news topics popular on the site-that would make it “more automated.”įacebook’s move away from human editors was supposed to extinguish the (farcically overblown) controversy over allegations of liberal bias in the trending news section. The blunder came just three days after Facebook fired the entire New York–based team of contractors that had been curating and editing the trending news section, as Quartz first reported on Friday and Slate has confirmed.
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