As part of its ongoing effort to bring more diversity of content into your News Feed & avoid creating echo chambers, where all users see information that reinforces their existing beliefs. Facebook has announced another update to Trending Stories. While also adding in a new way to showcase trending news in your region/country/city.
The latest change to in this new feauture will see Facebook present a new carousel layout for each topic & highlighting a set of stories from a range of publications covering the issue which you can flip through.
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By making it easier to see what other news outlets are saying about each topic, we hope that people will feel more informed about the news in their region
Guys essentialy this is another way for Facebook to exposure users to more perspectives without intruding on the personalization of their Facebook experience. Facebook notes that there is no predetermined list of publications that are eligible to appear in Trending & the stories that are featured are chosen based on engagement with each post, engagement with each publisher and the amount of other articles linking to it.
Facebook denied the claims and conducted an investigation which were found no systematic bias in their process, but in the wake of these accusations facebook announced a range of updates to their Trending News approach. Including the removal of manual curators, switching to a purely algorithm-fuelled feed & with the descriptions shortened to Twitter, basic topic descriptions to further reduce the need for manual interference or editors.
This new approach is part of Facebook reluctant ac-knowledgement of that fact, and their efforts to help facilitate greater understanding by exposing more users to more news sources though. Really it’s probably not going to work.
As Facebook explained
One of the things we regularly hear from people who use (Trending) is that it can be difficult to find in the Facebook mobile application. We were soon beginning a test in news Feed that will show people the top three Trending stories. Which they can click to see the full list of Trending topics and explore what people are discussing on Facebook.