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Barely two days after changes to its Trending Topics section, a fake article about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly began trending on Facebook — before entirely disappearing on Monday morning.
The incident came on the heels of Facebook’s announcement on Friday that human curators will no longer write the short descriptions that accompany trending topics on the site. Its trending news team was then shown the door. The Trending Topics section has been shrouded in controversy since May, when a Gizmodo report alleged an inherent bias in its prioritization of news articles, which also triggered a Congressional investigation as well as an internal Facebook investigation.
The changes, clearly, are not devoid of problems. For our latest Digiday Confessions, we talked to a member of the now-defunct trending news team at Facebook, who reflected on the recent developments as well as time spent working on the team.
Digiday has also reached out to Facebook for comment but has not yet received a response....
A former Facebook trending news curator dishes all and it's a fascinating look at Facebook's "newsroom", ops and challenges. At the end of the day, it lacked journalistic integrity and suffered from poor editorial oversight and no purpose. Sound like many other newsrooms struggling for relevance, clicks and survival? Recommended reading! 9.5/10