We’ve already covered Facebook and its “neutral” algorithms in one of our previous articles. Now we’ll talk about the most recent development, which is Facebook’s announcement of an update to Trending feature.
It appears that Facebook will ditch story descriptions for Trending topics, which means that this feature will now contain the headings for the most talked about and shared stories on the site, as well as the number of people talking about that particular topic. “This is based on the number of original posts that mention the topic and shares of posts about the topic,” they explain.
This should be a more algorithmically driven process than before that will allow Trending feature to cover more topics. Also, you will now be able to see what people are talking about a certain topic if you simply hover over it, or click on it. This way you will get to see the news sources covering the topic, posts discussing it and “an automatically selected original news story with an excerpt pulled directly from the top article itself.”
While all this sounds like good news, there’s something that stands out in Facebook’s announcement: “There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality”. This basically means that Facebook will still use the old-fashioned way to make sure the algorithm doesn’t keep showing mundane topics, such as #sleep, #dinner, and so on. However, with an approach like this, there’s always a chance that the humans will control more than mundane topics.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how this pans out.
Source: Facebook (newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/08/search-fyi-an-update-to-trending/)
Digital Trends (http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/facebook-trending-feed-update-descriptions/)
The Wonderful World of Algorithms 