Social networking giant Facebook on Friday said that it will remove its ‘trending’ topics news section next week and will replace it with a new ‘breaking news’ label available for posts. The decision was taken after the trending section faced a lot of criticism. The development was confirmed by Facebook’s head of news products, Alex Hardiman who said that the feature was only available in five countries and had only accounted for an average of 1.5 per cent of clicks to a media outlet’s page.
“From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful,” Hardiman wrote in a post. The company said that in place of this, it will explore news-related projects like letting publishers include a “breaking news” label on their posts in Facebook’s newsfeed. Hardiman said Facebook is testing the new label with 80 publishers across North America, South America, Europe, India and Australia.
Facebook will also introduce a new section on Facebook Watch, the platform’s on-demand video service, that will show exclusive “live coverage, daily news briefings and weekly deep dives,” according to Hardiman.
The company has faced criticism over the spread of fake news across its site. It tried to temper this by removing human reviewers who helped manage trending topics in favour of supposedly unbiased algorithms.
It also addressed the fake news accusations by adding new labels and working with third-party groups to review the veracity of stories posted on the site. Facebook eventually fired the editors on the trending team, replacing them with an automated process.
However, it led to more embarrassment for the website as the algorithms promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories, a false story about then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly, and a parody news article about magical iPhone features, which some say were early indicators of Facebook’s misinformation problem.
The company was recently hit by the Cambridge Analytica scandal after which the lawmakers in Congress and in Europe have raised the possibility of drafting new regulations to address Facebook’s privacy violations. Some critics have even called on antitrust officials to break the company up.
