![]() ![]() ![]() Reviewers are, however, required to check whether the headline of an article being promoted within a trend is clickbait or a hoax or contains "demonstrably false information." Yet hoaxes and fake news continue to fool the algorithm and the reviewers.įacebook executives have acknowledged that its current Trending algorithm and product is not as good as it needs to be. A Facebook spokesperson told BuzzFeed news theirs is more of a quality assurance role than an editorial one. After that, the 2008 conspiracy post trended.įacebook now has a "review team" working on Trending, but their new guidelines require them to exercise less editorial oversight than the previous team. At least five fake stories were promoted by Facebook’s Trending algorithm during a recent three-week period analyzed by the Washington Post. Two days after dismissing the editors, a fake news story about Megyn Kelly being fired by Fox News made the Trending list. Three months later, the company fired the editors and let an algorithm take a bigger role with reduced human oversight. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg convened an apologetic meeting with conservative media leaders. In May, Gizmodo reported that the dedicated human editors who helped select topics and news stories for the Trending box said some of their colleagues “routinely suppressed” news of interest to a conservative audience. Taking Trending globalįacebook’s abrupt doubling down on an algorithm to identify trending discussions and related news stories has its roots in the company’s reaction to a political controversy. “ making an assumption that we’re more comfortable with a machine being biased than with a human being biased, because people don’t understand machines as well,” she said. Less human oversight means more reliance on the algorithm, which creates a new set of concerns, according to Kate Starbird, an assistant professor at the University of Washington who has been using machine learning and other technology to evaluate the accuracy of rumors and information during events such as the Boston bombings. “I’m sure that once in a while there is going to be a very high-profile failure.” “I think people are always going to try and outsmart these algorithms - we’ve seen this with search engine optimization,” she said. She said reducing the amount of human oversight for Trending heightens the likelihood of failures, and of the algorithm being fooled by people trying to game it. Kalina Bontcheva leads the EU-funded PHEME project working to compute the veracity of social media content. Three top researchers who have spent years building systems to identify rumors and misinformation on social networks, and to flag and debunk them, told BuzzFeed News that Facebook made an already big challenge even more difficult when it fired its team of editors for Trending. “Automatic (computational) fact-checking, detection of misinformation, and discrimination of true and fake news stories based on content are all extremely hard problems,” said Fil Menczer, a computer scientist at Indiana University who is leading a project to automatically identify social media memes and viral misinformation. ![]() As Facebook prepares to roll out the Trending feature to even more of its 1.7 billion users, computer scientists are warning that its current algorithm-driven approach with less editorial oversight may be no match for viral lies. The social network where 44% of Americans go to get news has in recent weeks promoted in its Trending box everything from the satirical claim that Siri would jump out of iPhones to the lunatic theory that Presidents Bush and Obama conspired to rig the 2008 election. Facebook has placed a high-stakes - and, experts say, unwise - bet that an algorithm can play the lead role in stanching the flood of misinformation the powerful social network promotes to its users.
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