Potential trending topics are identified by an algorithm, or formula, Facebook said, then reviewed by a "Trending Topics" team.
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INSIDE FACEBOOK'S TRENDING TOPICS: Gizmodo has been on a tear recently with stories from inside Facebook, and today's file on the people behind its "trending topics" feature is no exception.
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Shortly after this story was published, Facebook VP of global operations Justin Osofsky posted a broad overview of how the Trending Topics tool works, in addition to Facebook's updated Trending Topics guidelines.
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Trending topics have moved to the right, alongside follow suggestions.
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Its "trending" topics feature is therefore a powerful political influence.
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The Twitter hashtag #Brexit topped the list of trending topics.
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They try to manipulate trending topics and autocomplete on search.
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Even trending topics are relegated to an easily overlooked sidebar.
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Trending topics no longer shows a summary with each trend.
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Think of this as LinkedIn's equivalent of Facebook's trending topics.
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It's me, the algorithm that runs Facebook's trending topics section.
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It's been a rough few days for Facebook's Trending Topics.
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The site has been among Facebook's trending topics since Thursday.
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Hashtags — unlike trending topics — still have their place on Twitter.
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We were there because of this ONE accusation on Trending Topics.
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At the time, there were no hashtags and no trending topics.
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Meanwhile, Facebook is giving more exposure to Trending Topics on mobile.
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Now, it seems, Facebook has taken to deleting trending topics wholesale.
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I just no longer find trump trending topics or memes funny.
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Facebook responded by shifting Trending Topics to a more automated system.
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Facebook tried this, to a very limited extent, with Trending Topics.
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A lot of the "news," the trending topics, is like gossip.
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The inadvertent tweet was sent during routine monitoring of trending topics.
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"My team is responsible for Trending Topics, and I want to address today's reports alleging that Facebook contractors manipulated Trending Topics to suppress stories of interest to conservatives," Stocky wrote in a carefully worded Facebook post.
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"This should surface trending topics quicker, be more effective at capturing a broader range of news and events from around the world, and also help ensure that trending topics reflect real world events," the company said.
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Here's the RSS list: RSS List - FB Trending Topics by Noah Kulwin And here's the 1K list: Media 1K List - FB Trending Topics by Noah Kulwin This story has been updated continually as news has developed.
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It was liked by both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg:My team is responsible for Trending Topics, and I want to address today's reports alleging that Facebook contractors manipulated Trending Topics to suppress stories of interest to conservatives.
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Almost instantly, that survey made it to Facebook's coveted Trending Topics section.
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Trending Topics is designed to showcase the current conversation happening on Facebook.
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Sabrina held up her phone, opened Twitter, and pulled up trending topics.
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The list of trending topics is now a bit of a mess.
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Perhaps photos of the army of robots that now control trending topics?
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The very nature of trending topics is just that—a transitory trend.
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It's an interesting and timely stat, considering Facebook's recent Trending Topics controversy.
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Facebook denied the accusations, but ultimately changed how it filters Trending Topics.
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NB: The AEI event was scheduled before the Trending Topics story broke.
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Facebook deployed a revised version of its controversial "Trending Topics" feature Thursday.
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Facebook's "trending" topics section had become a focal point of such criticisms.
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It will also be able to bring Trending Topics to more languages.
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Facebook was recently accused of suppressing conservative news from its trending topics.
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Monitor trending topics on your Facebook page to see what's making headlines?
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Rather than only show Trending topics in the drop-down when you go to search for something on Facebook's mobile app, the company will test showing a box with the top three current Trending topics inside the News Feed.
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It's not a surprise that Trending Topics went so wrong, so quickly — according to Adam Schrader, a former writer for Trending Topics, the tool pulled its hashtagged titles from Wikipedia, a source with its own struggles with the truth.
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For a while, those things just became trending topics before swiftly fading away.
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By halftime, nine of the trending topics in the US were NBA-related.
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Overwhelming Twitter's trending topics algorithm to create a trend on demand isn't new.
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Last night, Bella Thorne's name became one of the trending topics on Twitter.
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The hashtag #FreeEzhel was one of the top trending topics on Turkish Twitter.
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" Stocky also said that "we do not insert stories artificially into trending topics.
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After the switch, Trending Topics repeatedly surfaced conspiracy theories and outright false information.
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The guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.
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Following the redesign, trending topics will now appear with a 'Try Searching' heading.
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These guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in Trending Topics.
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Updates: Trending topics will now feature a publisher headline below each topic name.
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On Friday, Facebook announced changes to how it handles the Trending Topics section.
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On Twitter, his unfiltered communiqués are retweeted and embedded and become trending topics.
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The claims appeared at odds with Facebook's assertion that trending topics were identified by algorithms and only then reviewed by the trending topics team to meet certain standards, such as whether the topic was tied to a current, real news event.
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Trending Topics displays trending news headlines and story summaries in a sidebar next to the main news feed, and a former contractor who worked on Trending Topics has alleged that conservative news topics and outlets were often blocked from appearing.
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The company published a blog post today explaining how its "trending topics" feature works.
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The change would remove the need for people to write descriptions for trending topics.
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While Facebook had trending topics, you couldn't find individual keyword matches until last year.
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Twitter is ready to squeeze a lot more money out of its trending topics.
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Today's announcement is the first major update to the Trending Topics feature this year.
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Trending Topics is designed to surface the most newsworthy and popular conversations on Facebook.
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What is the relationship between the News Feed and Trending Topics supposed to be?
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And so whatever becomes of Trending Topics, doubts about Facebook and journalism will persist.
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Also, the hashtag #IVotedForTrump was one of the platforms trending topics earlier this week.
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The "For You" section is now more personalized with interests, suggestions, and trending topics.
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It was among the top trending topics in the United Arab Emirates on Thursday.
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The feed also highlighted trending topics on Twitter, where economy was the most popular.
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Other efforts: The company announced last week that will end its "Trending" topics feature.
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Last year, Facebook killed Trending Topics, populated by contractors, after being accused of bias.
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Since then, the Trending Topics feature has been criticized for repeatedly surfacing fake news.
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With that connectivity came the spread and sharing of hashtags, trending topics, and memes.
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It led Twitter's trending topics in the U.S. and was in the top three worldwide.
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The saga of Facebook Trending Topics never seems to end—and it drives us nuts.
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The news from Taiwan was among trending topics Friday on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter.
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Exactly how Facebook's Trending Topics section works — and how much traffic it drives — is unclear.
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Those recommendations are based on interests, trending topics, time, weather and locations, the website reads.
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He also requested a list of stories removed or "injected" into the trending topics section.
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Popular trending topics among the bot network include shooter, NRA, shooting, Nikolas, Florida, and teacher.
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The Trending Topics flap may have opened a new dimension of skepticism around Facebook's products.
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The new search field in the Apple Store app includes trending topics and voice searching.
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On the right, the search bar features more prominently above a list of trending topics.
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Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, has demanded answers about how Trending Topics works.
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The hashtag #BoycottIndiana appeared on Twitter's list of trending topics, and remained there for days.
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At one point, Stephens represented the top four trending topics on the social media platform.
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They also released the guidelines that were given to editors for the trending topics section.
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Tech Talk: Mark Zuckerberg launched an investigation to see if Facebook trending topics are biased.
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Many Twitter users noticed that "Kill All Jews" was among the platform's trending topics today.
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Thousands of people have been tweeting: "Trump 46%," which was among the day's trending topics.
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In the wake of the revelations, dueling trending topics have emerged for #ImWithAmber and #ImWithJohnny.
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Both of those hashtags were among the top trending topics on Twitter over the weekend.
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After vehement denial of any bias in trending topics, Facebook announced sweeping changes three days ago to the way the Trending system works, including greater oversight for news curators and a clearer description of how the trending topics system works in the Facebook Help Center.
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Twitter's new Explore tab bundles Moments, trending topics, search, and live video into a single page.
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"Mitt Romney" quickly became one of the top-trending topics on Twitter in the United States.
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Trending Topics shows you the popular topics and hashtags that are being talked about on Facebook.
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Hashtags are used to flag and search for themes on Twitter, which tracks popular trending topics.
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At this moment, #deleteuber is still sitting at the top of the trending topics on Twitter.
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Facebook axed human-written descriptions from its "trending topics" after facing accusations of suppressing conservative news.
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PEOPLE is your one-stop shop for all the latest news, trending topics and celebrity scoop.
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The single was one of the earlier examples of how Drake verses could become trending topics.
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He said that his team would continue to work to make the Trending Topics politically neutral.
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The Silicon Valley company faces allegations of intentionally suppressing conservative news from appearing on Trending Topics.
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The Trending Topics list purports to show only those subjects which are trending organically on Facebook.
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Few shows dominate Twitter trending topics or fuel fiery debates between the sexes quite like Insecure.
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These are the trending topics, which are a good way to find popular conversations on Twitter.
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These are the trending topics, which are a good way to find popular conversations on Twitter.
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"It's a major area of investment for us to make trending topics more reliable," he said.
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Facebook in 2014 hired people to pick "trending topics" that the site highlighted on its website.
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"Trending Topics" was also based on an algorithm, but with a bit of humanity on top.
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Facebook says automating story descriptions will help it expand Trending Topics to more countries and languages.
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In a letter sent to CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, the committee asks for a thorough explanation of how Trending Topics work, what the guidelines are for determining which topics to include or remove, under what circumstances a curator might inject a story into Trending Topics, and more.
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That same day, Ahuja had another conversation with a second employee at Trending Topics named Ryan Villarreal.
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News directors trying to decipher the Trending Topics algorithm were really peering into an editorial funhouse mirror.
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Given how bad Trending Topics has been since August, I'm taking today's news as a good sign.
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Political actors have gamed Twitter India's trending topics to promote propaganda and to influence the news cycle.
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Namely, latching onto popular hashtags and helping to push them to the top of Twitter's trending topics.
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Facebook, for example, has struggled to get into breaking news and just closed its Trending topics section.
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In 2016, human moderators at Facebook were accused of purging conservative news from its trending topics section.
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Facebook has declared — again — that its Trending Topics section is free of any political bias or manipulation.
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Facebook is now explicitly denying that any of its Trending Topics editors prevented conservative topics from appearing.
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The video detailing Trump's shifting views has since gone viral, earning a spot in Twitter's trending topics.
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You'll also find things like trending topics on Twitter, random GIFs, calendar updates, Samsung themes and more.
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But ironically the cover-up itself is trending, with "Don's Johns" one of Twitter's trending topics Friday.
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Thune's request for more information about how Trending Topics works, and look forward to addressing his questions.
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In May, Gizmodo reported that Facebook contractors had stifled conservative news from making its Trending Topics section.
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Like fake news and trending topics, the feature could become the social network's latest can of worms.
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"Enflasyon" - the Turkish word for inflation - was among the country's top trending topics on Twitter on Tuesday.
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After Sunday night's premiere, all of Twitter's top trending topics in the United States were "Thrones"-related.
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" The letter to Facebook includes requests for information on the organizational structure for the "Trending Topics feature.
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A Facebook spokesman said it had received Thune's request for more information about how "Trending Topics" works.
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Earlier this year, Facebook's "Trending Topics" news feed garnered negative press for supposedly suppressing pro-conservative stories.
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It should also be noted that, by default, Twitter trends are tailored to users' interests and location: On Monday nights my trending topics typically include a bunch of hashtags from WWE Monday Night Raw, while a football fan is likely to see trending topics related to Monday Night Football.
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Finding a trustworthy source for news and trending topics has still been difficult in the content farm era.
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It quickly reached millions of readers and, in a delicious irony, appeared in the Trending Topics module itself.
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CNNMoney: Facebook's 'trending topics' spark debate In social media news, that trend is always going to be novelty.
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We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so.
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Our review guidelines for Trending Topics are under constant review, and we will continue to look for improvements.
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The company shut down the product that was accused of being biased: a human-curated Trending Topics feature.
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This recent history is particularly interesting in regards to a test that Facebook is running around Trending topics.
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Consider this your ICYMI monthly update on the trending topics everybody has been buzzing about at the watercooler.
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Fake news, in all its varied iterations, is high on the list of our current moment's trending topics.
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In the wake of the Times story, the Twitter hashtag #lasttimetrumppaidtaxes shot to the top of trending topics.
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That content, like the rest of Explore, is surfaced in a mix of personalized recommendations and trending topics.
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BROADLY: Is it someone's specific job to keep an eye out for trending topics to turn into costumes?
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By Friday, the #DStrong hashtag was among the top 10 trending topics on Weibo, China's dominant microblogging site.
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Trending Topics also directed users to a viral video in which a man masturbates with a McDonald's sandwich.
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His Weibo post was one of the top trending topics on the microblogging site, attracting over 3,800 comments.
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Such as, for example, the concerns raised last month about the underlying workings of Facebook's Trending Topics section.
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Facebook's Trending Topics news ticker has been updated after showing readers a tabloid article promoting September 11th conspiracies.
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Bits For such a tiny part of Facebook, its Trending Topics feature sure has become a major headache.
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The terms sat at the top of Twitter's list of trending topics in the hours following the news.
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The meeting is the highest-profile part of Facebook's response to the controversy over the trending topics section.
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Weibo prominently featured the list of U.S. goods that China is targeting among the day's "hot" trending topics.
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You can filter the news stories to see just trending topics, or search for keywords or specific shows.
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The decision turned its Trending Topics section into a breeding ground for fake news that flooded the platform.
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They're already scared about ticking off Republicans over there after the monthslong saga that was Trending Topics-gate.
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On the left you'll find Twitter's navigation bar, while trending topics can now be found on the right.
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It lets users follow other users, repost messages, and follow trending topics with the use of hashtags, like Twitter.
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When Chris (Andrew Scott) opens his Smithereens app one of the trending topics is Ashley O playing at Wembley.
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The firing of Fearnow and Villarreal set the Trending Topics team on edge—and Nuñez kept digging for dirt.
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When the company fired its human editors for Trending Topics, Facebook made a clear choice in favor of algorithms.
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The arrival of Kardashian and West's third child swiftly became on of the top five trending topics on Twitter.
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He sees Victory Lab as a cheaper alternative for undercutting platforms like Twitter, which offer legitimate promoted trending topics.
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Merlo estimates that these days, around 2000% of all trending topics in Mexico are controlled by digital marketing firms.
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He's able to push fake news, dark ads, and false trending topics easily — and his main clientele are politicians.
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Few episodes garner more attention, viewership and trending topics on Twitter than The Bachelor and The Bachelorette's Fantasy Suites.
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The 3rd Hour of Today provides viewers with trending topics and news but also delivers personal and relatable segments.
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But that's causing trending topics to veer off course, highlighting a false news story and various other mix-ups.
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Facebook said its investigation showed that conservative and liberal topics were approved as trending topics at nearly identical rates.
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Facebook is getting rid of its Trending Topics feature, according to a blog post the social network published Friday.
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Under that are some prompts to update Pages that I am involved with; upcoming events; trending topics; and ads.
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But the revelation that Trending Topics were chosen with editorial input raised new questions about Facebook's relationship with journalism.
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This week, there was a report suggesting that Facebook contractors working on Trending Topics suppressed stories with conservative viewpoints.
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Somewhat surprisingly, Thune's push to investigate Trending Topics is an about-face from his previous stance on online content.
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The fake news accelerated earlier this year after Facebook fired its human curators in favor of automated trending topics.
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Facebook then fired the team in place of an algorithm, which instead regularly surfaced fake news onto Trending Topics.
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The website has said it wants an interview with Mr. Zuckerberg to publicly explain how Trending topics decisions work.
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After Facebook deals with the political questions surrounding Trending Topics, it may be time to address the usefulness issue.
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One editor for Facebook's trending topics section alleged that workers had omitted stories and news sources popular with conservatives.
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They were outraged by claims that Facebook manipulated its trending topics feature to push down results related to Republicans.
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It's not clear if any such direction was given to the independent contractors working on its Trending topics team.
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It recently fired its (already too few) editors responsible for weeding out fake news from its trending topics section.
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And for Facebook, that will mean even more changes to how it surfaces news in the Trending Topics section.
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Here's Eric Newcomer at Bloomberg: On Wednesday morning, the hashtag #NeverWarren appeared at the top of Twitter's trending topics.
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Can't say I'm shocked, considering Facebook is terrified of ticking off conservatives after its Trending Topics fiasco this year.
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Glenn Beck will soon meet with Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the recent controversy over the social network's "Trending Topics" section.
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Back in May 2016 a whistleblower alleged that Facebook's Trending Topics feature was proactively designed to suppress conservative-minded content.
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The post went viral, but the ensuing battle over Trending Topics did more than just dominate a few news cycles.
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Glenn Beck, however, was alarmed by the lack of evidence that Trending topics were being manipulated in the way claimed.
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For example, Arby's social media editors love to draw trending topics and figures onto napkins with the restaurant's namesake sauce.
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The "trending" from Facebook's ill-fated Trending Topics; "story" from Instagram Stories; "lines" from Timeline, as used by everything everywhere.
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In the end though, it seems like people found it far more convenient to organize around hashtags and trending topics.
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Image: APToday, Facebook announced that human curators will no longer write short descriptions that accompany trending topics on the site.
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An …Read more ReadIt's important to note that Facebook originally claimed its Trending Topics section was sorted by an algorithm.
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To reduce liability, Facebook removed human moderators from its trending topics column that Summer, though humans still field content complaints.
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Facebook has already faced allegations of censorship over its Trending Topics feature, which was overhauled in the wake of controversy.
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The Senate Commerce Committee sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg asking him to answer questions about Facebook's Trending Topics feature.
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"We've reflected a lot," said Justin Osofsky, Facebook's vice president for global operations and media partnerships, which includes Trending Topics.
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Reports on Monday emerged that contractors working as "curators" in Facebook's trending topics section were omitting conservative news topics. Sen.
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Trending topics are produced by a team of editors based on a list of popular issues generated by an algorithm.
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Yet it came to a sudden halt and was pushed off the trending topics list as its momentum kept building.
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This is a win for users who don't browse Facebook in English and might get access to Trending Topics sooner.
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Employees are still deciding which stories appear in the Trending Topics module, just as they were before the controversy arose.
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Ron Paul (R-Texas) said Congress should not meddle with how Facebook curates the political content on its trending topics.
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"We do not insert stories artificially into trending topics, and do not instruct our reviewers to do so," he said.
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The tool, called Trending Topics, is available for free to any newsroom that utilizes Google's free analytics platform, Google Analytics.
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Trending Topics uses a variety of mechanisms to help surface events and topics that are happening in the real world.
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In 2016, Gizmodo ran a report about "news curators" for Facebook's trending topics section admitting that they often suppressed conservative news.
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This newfound appreciation for the concerns of journalists did not, however, extend to the journalists on Facebook's own Trending Topics team.
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Moments will still be featured in the new tab, but they'll be de-emphasized in favor of trending topics and search.
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It's hard to imagine Facebook not eventually figuring out a way to run trending topics with little or no human input.
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Users posting in support of Bolsonaro have also pushed a hashtag translating as "TheAmazonWithoutNGOs" into the trending topics on the platform.
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Mashable originally reported in July that Facebook was testing a Trending Topics variation that appeared to have removed editor-written headlines.
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" Most notably, the "blacklisting" tool—used to block naturally trending topics from inclusion in the trending section—will be renamed "revisit.
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Apple's News app has been more personalized in iOS 9.3 with more suggestions for things like trending topics and Editor's Picks.
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Reporters and users online noticed Monday that Facebook's trending topics page was surfacing results from Kremlin-sponsored media outlet Sputnik News.
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Facebook gave editors broad leeway in choosing topics for its Trending Topics system, according to internal documents obtained by The Guardian.
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However, whether people will take the time to search for trending topics and read through the posts is another issue altogether.
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Facebook is still fending off fallout from a Gizmodo report last month suggesting political bias in the company's Trending Topics operation.
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Facebook last week released its guidelines for choosing trending topics, but the operations of the news feed algorithm remain closely guarded.
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Leaked documents show that Facebook's trending topics are not solely derived from the social media network's algorithms, according to The Guardian.
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The social network has come under criticism in recent months for continually promoting fake news stories through its "Trending Topics" algorithm.
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Gizmodo initially reported that editors behind the company's Trending Topics feature were routinely excluding stories and news sources popular with conservatives.
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The company tried to temper this by removing human reviewers who helped manage trending topics in favor of supposedly unbiased algorithms.
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When she's not crafting 280-character jokes for Twitter, Nolan browses her feed, trending topics, and even reads her own mentions.
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Twitter removed it from the trending topics sidebar, although many instances of the hashtag were using it in a critical light.
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The social network came under attack earlier this year for allegedly suppressing conservative news from appearing in the Trending Topics section.
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In fact, our analysis indicated that the rates of approval of conservative and liberal topics are virtually identical in Trending Topics.
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Reports emerged Monday that contractors working as "curators" for Facebook omitted stories by conservative news sites from the platform's trending topics.
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During the 2016 election, some former Facebook employees revealed that the company regularly suppressed news and "trending" topics on conservative issues.
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By Wednesday evening, #ÉCoisaDePreto — Portuguese for "It's a black thing" — was one of the top trending topics on Twitter in Brazil.
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Details: The tool, called Trending Topics , is available for free to any newsroom that utilizes Google's free analytics platform, Google Analytics.
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Trending Topics is a feature on the social network that tells people what popular topics are being discussed on the site.
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Abe's comment set off a social media firestorm and was one of the top trending topics on Japanese Twitter on Wednesday.
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Usually the troll accounts tweeted the exact same message as every other troll account in an attempt to control trending topics.
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Twitter's trending topics in Egypt tell you everything you need to know about the mood of the country at the moment.
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There's also a 'search' stream that looks a lot like Twitter, where you can find articles, official accounts, and trending topics.
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Even so, the social network, which is making a tour of contrition after accusations that it actively suppresses conservative content, said it would make some changes to Trending Topics, including no longer referring to a list of national news sources — like Fox News, The New York Times and BuzzFeed News — to "boost" topics appearing on its Trending Topics.
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Others poked fun at the tweet, with the hashtag #Yeti becoming one of the top Twitter trending topics in India on Tuesday.
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In a post published to Facebook's media relations section on Thursday, a senior company official outlined its "Trending Topics" guidelines at length.
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Tom Stocky, the head of the trending-topics section at Facebook, maxed out with an individual donation of $2,700 to Hillary Clinton.
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The right-hand bar on LinkedIn's desktop version, called "Today's news and views," looks similar to Facebook's now-defunct Trending Topics tab.
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News of the gene discovery again sent Ice Bucket Challenge viral, proving one of the top trending topics on Twitter on Wednesday.
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Twitter's trending topics feature is controlled by an algorithm and caters to individual users based on their location and who they follow.
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Frankly, it's all a bit confusing, because Trending Topics and Trending News don't seem to be tied directly together at this point.
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Facebook has struggled to keep fake news out of its Trending Topics section now that it is almost entirely run by algorithms.
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From Refinery29, After After Party invites comedians, celebrities, cultural critics, and you to dig into the trending topics you care most about.
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This follows Facebook's strategy of using artificial intelligence for curation instead of humans, like it just started to with Trending Topics descriptions.
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TechCrunch writes that Facebook's Trending Topics are determined at least in part by the number of articles and posts on the topic.
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The company was accused of making politically biased choices about which news stories showed up as trending topics in users' news feeds.
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Similar to Facebook and Twitter's trending topics section, I recently spotted popular searches populating on Google in my Safari browser on iOS.
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At the same time Zombie will analyse web activity for trending topics — which can be matched to Le Temp's database of content.
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Crowell also said that Twitter was aware that globally there are attempts to manipulate conversations, search and trending topics on the platform.
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However, despite the post's mysterious nature, the Twittersphere is anxiously awaiting the event, with #LEMONADE becoming one of the app's trending topics.
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Facebook utilizes a human editorial team in determining and presenting the content in its trending topics section, according to a new report.
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However, the trending topics box is a trivial part of the site, and almost invisible on mobile, where most people use Facebook.
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The algorithms used to produce Trending Topics were undoubtedly created against a backdrop of growth-inspired goals and metrics, like increasing engagement.
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But Trending Topics is a marginal product compared to the News Feed, which is the primary place where Facebook users see content.
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It has even allowed fake news stories to show up as trending topics – something a human-powered editorial team would likely catch.
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Public sentiment on social media appears to be overwhelmingly in favor of Uber, with "#idon'tusetaxis" and "#don'ttouchuber" becoming trending topics in Turkish.
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It similarly has teamed up with French newsrooms to create digital tools, including ways to track trending topics during that country's election.
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By Friday morning, Goebbels and Nazi were trending topics on Twitter in Brazil as users shared news stories and memes expressing horror.
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The #IvyParkXAdidas hashtag made it to at least #3 on Twitter's top 10 trending topics in the United States during the day.
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In a post published on Facebook's media relations section on Thursday, a senior company official outlined its "Trending Topics" guidelines at length.
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Frisella leads what he calls the 100-0 movement, and the show dives head-first into trending topics and hot-button issues.
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And through the algorithms of my digital command center, we will sift through those trending topics and we will solve your problems.
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Among them were the allegations that editors for the trending topics feature had omitted conservative content and news sources from the list.
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He asked his designers to look at hot trending topics tied to companies and brands and turn them into ugly sweater designs.
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Facebook's trending topics, tailored to fulfill each user's particular online habits, served me up a pop-celebrity version of the day's events.
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Last month, Facebook updated its Trending Topics feature, which offers links to popular subjects, to better promote links to reliable news outlets.
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If you've used Facebook on a desktop or laptop computer, you might have noticed the "trending topics" box in the right rail.
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In May, Gizmodo reported that some editors who had worked on Facebook's Trending Topics section had been suppressing conservative points of view.
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Forget about Trending Topics: the act of enforcing—or choosing not to enforce—any kind of standards at all is an editorial decision.
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In October, Mashable reported that Twitter was testing an Explore tab for some users, but it only showed trending topics, search, and Moments.
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A day after the Gizmodo report, Facebook's search vice president, Tom Stocky, denied that Facebook had ever artificially inserted stories into trending topics.
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On Twitter, the hashtag #AbortoSeraLey has shot to the top of the trending topics in the country and people celebrated in the streets.
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The good people of Twitter also roundly applauded it, and caused her name quickly climb the list of trending topics on the platform.
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"I got the sense that they wanted to keep the magic about how trending topics work a secret," said another former news curator.
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Just three days after Facebook made headlines by dismissing the editors of its Trending Topics section, the feature made an easily avoidable mistake.
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"In fact, we confirmed that most of the subjects mentioned in media reports were included as Trending Topics on multiple occasions," Stretch added.
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The timing was fortuitous: a controversy over what news goes into Facebook's Trending Topics feature dominated headlines in the days before our interview.
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If such a record is not maintained, can such decisions be reconstructed or determined based on an analysis of the Trending Topics product?
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Facebook's Tom Stocky, who manages the Trending Topics team, responded to the concerns about censorship of conservative news items in a Facebook post.
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As Facebook has noted several times this week, algorithms drive much of the decision-making for its Trending Topics, according to the documents.
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And yet the Trending Topics module put the video under the headline Watch Dogs 2 — an upcoming video game about hacking and cybersecurity.
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A handful of conservatives are expressing displeasure after a top Republican senator began digging into allegations of bias in Facebook's "Trending Topics" feature.
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That move comes months after the site's trending topics were found to be more influenced by human editors than many people had believed.
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Facebook and Twitter can surface a nearly endless stream of content to users as they scroll through their timeline or pursue trending topics.
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A handful of conservatives are expressing displeasure after a top Republican senator began digging into allegations of bias in Facebook's "Trending Topics" feature.
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Just days after removing editors from curating Trending Topics, Facebook's news-driven section surfaced a fake story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.
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"In fact, our analysis indicated that the rates of approval of conservative and liberal topics are virtually identical in Trending Topics," said Stretch.
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Jay Z's alleged infidelity has clearly been one of the biggest trending topics of the week, thanks to Beyoncé's highly lauded Lemonade album.
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It had ripped off entire startups like TimeHop, which Facebook recreated as On This Day, or features like Twitter's hashtags and trending topics.
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Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature.
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Human beings will continue to be "involved" in Trending Topics, separating legitimate news events from the mundane hashtags that trend every day (#lunch).
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Her comments set social media aflame, and Ms. Kelly was one of the top trending topics on Twitter for much of the day.
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Even so, Late Show host Stephen Colbert noted that the momentous trial still couldn't beat Mr. Peanut or Gritty on Twitter's trending topics.
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"I want freedom of speech" also emerged as one of the top trending topics on the site, until government censors stopped the messages.
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What Business Insider discovered from this trending discrepancy draws into question the opaque process in how Twitter manages and monitors its trending topics.
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The outbreak was one of the top trending topics on Chinese social media platform Weibo, where many users expressed concerns about their safety.
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As part of the update, Facebook says it's going to stop pulling in trending topics that surface based off a single news report.
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That's not to mention the consistent promotion of false news stories through the company's "Trending Topics" module following the removal of human editors.
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The product looks very similar to what Facebook does with its own trending topics section, and is somewhat similar to Twitter's Moments feature.
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The Trending Topics controversy isn't an anomaly; deciding what does and doesn't get attention online is at the core of what these companies do.
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Instead, the new Explore tab, which for now is appearing only in Twitter's iOS and Android apps, highlights trending topics and search alongside Moments.
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The announcement ignited the #BoycottNetflix and #CancelNetflix trending topics on Twitter, where users slammed Netflix over its announcement it was bringing on the Obamas.
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Almost all questions are answered with references to sports, and sports are specifically addressed as the object of trending topics more than anything else.
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The screenshot below was provided by Mashable advertising reporter Patrick Kulp, who noticed a change in the Trending Topics section on his Facebook homepage.
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Mark Zuckerberg has promised a "full investigation" into the recent reports that Facebook suppressed news from conservative media outlets in its "Trending Topics" section.
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In May, Facebook faced allegations from conservatives of political bias in its trending topics section, leading to a public outcry and an internal investigation.
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First, Facebook faced charges of bias in its Trending Topics section, which promotes various news topics across categories like politics, sciences, technology and sports.
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Reporters have focused on the Trending Topics board largely because it's visible and accessible, even if it doesn't drive significant traffic or user interest.
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"We have found no evidence to date that Trending Topics was successfully manipulated, but will continue the review of all our practices," he said.
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After former contractors reported that they suppressed conservative Trending topics on Facebook in 2016, Facebook took a lot of heat for supposed liberal bias.
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Trending Topics, on the other hand, is run by the company's search team, and is meant to take the pulse of all current events.
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But the next time a story important to conservatives isn't getting play in Trending Topics or the News Feed, expect to hear about it.
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The company was accused of biasing its Trending Topics section against conservative news, and as result got rid of the humans who curated it.
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This allowed the company to show users everything from trending topics to live video (and the remnants of Moments) in a single, dedicated space.
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Corporate Twitter lit up with blizzard chatter on Friday after the storm climbed to one of the top trending topics in the United States.
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And Trending Topics includes an "x" for each story on hover, which gives the algorithm a signal about what readers don't want to see.
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Props to Peter Hamby, Snap's head of news, for making sure they curate stories with smart news judgment (*cough* Facebook Trending Topics disaster *cough*).
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Users discovered that Trending Topics, among many other areas of the site, was a source for the spread of fake news from disreputable websites.
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Facebook said in a Monday letter that now-changed guidelines for its trending topics feature may have favored stories coming from mainstream media outlets.
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When pop culture news used to happen, brands would often jump on the trending topics to promote their products with a light-hearted quip.
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O'Reilly's comments come a few days after a report from Gizmodo alleged that some contracts working on Facebook's trending topics had downplayed conservative media.
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From there, he and the other Trending Topics writers would scan through news stories and Facebook posts to determine why the topic was trending.
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Twitter is currently experimenting with a tab called "Explore" and "Happening," which will show trending topics and Moments and could incorporate live video streams.
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Now it will use the same list of trending topics for everybody in the same country, regardless of what topics you may enjoy most.
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Carey has 21.4 million followers, and news of the hack was one of the top trending topics in the U.S. on New Year's Eve.
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Facebook is in full damage control mode this week, following a brewing scandal over whether or not the Trending Topics it surfaces are politically biased.
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With Facebook's trending topics operating without human editors and editorial judgment, it isn't always the case a live video will be accessible from the homepage.
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But it sparked a congressional inquiry, Facebook recklessly shut down the human-curated trending topics unit, and the great fake news reckoning of 2016 began.
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What hasn't been widely reported is how Zuckerberg initially handled pacifying conservatives in the days following the initial fallout around the manipulation of Trending Topics.
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When Gizmodo published its story about political bias on the Trending Topics team in May, the article went off like a bomb in Menlo Park.
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Facebook's human reviewers work in what amounts to a boiler room, where the trending topics list is curated and peppered with additional, potentially viral hits.
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Vince Coglianese, executive editor of The Daily Caller, isn't terribly shocked to hear that Facebook might have been downplaying conservative media in its trending topics.
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John Lewis, an icon on the civil rights movement, led the protest as the hashtag #NoBillNoBreak quickly climbed to the top of Twitter's trending topics.
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Like Twitter, Weibo features trending topics, and sometimes sends push notifications to your smartphone about a current popular trend if you have the app installed.
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Notably, the #RepealThe19th hashtag wasn't showing up in the trending topics section on Twitter, though it was at the top of the list on Facebook.
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Stocky's explanation today backs up much of what was reported by Gizmodo in a look at the inner workings of Facebook's Trending Topics last week.
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Before the controversy over Trending Topics unfolded, I had pitched Facebook on a discussion about both Instant Articles and the company's thinking around editorial values.
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Facebook says it's altering the makeup of its controversial Trending Topics section in response to a Senate inquiry over alleged censorship of conservative news sources.
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In fact, 1D-related trending topics are so popular that's it's almost more rare to see a Twitter trending sidebar without one than with one.
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On Tuesday, social media lit up with congratulatory messages and "Ella and Alexander" was among the top trending topics on Twitter in the United States.
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The company has faced several challenges this year, such as editorial bias in their trending topics team and the removal of a historic war photo.
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Facebook has recently been accused of suppressing conservative news on a feature of its desktop version, called "Trending Topics", which shows the current top stories.
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Facebook on Friday said that it will scrap its "trending" topics news section next week and introduce a new "breaking news" label available for posts.
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The Trending Topics episode paralyzed Facebook's willingness to make any serious changes to its products that might compromise the perception of its objectivity, employees said.
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But fashion and beauty aren't the only industries that experience trends — there are plenty of trending topics within the realm of sex and intimacy, too.
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Facebook was rocked in May by anonymous allegations that that editors behind the trending topics section had downplayed stories and news sources popular with conservatives.
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When asked about Facebook firing its team of description-writing curators, and the impact on its Trending Topics product, Mosseri said "I think it's better".
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Facebook's media troubles began this spring, when a contractor on its Trending Topics team told Gizmodo that the site was biased against conservative media outlets.
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It would be heartening if Twitter took this moment to retire trending topics and take other concrete steps to slow the spread of conspiracy theories.
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At its best, its previous "Trending Topics" section would often surface stories that were old and sometimes bore little relevance to the topic in question.
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On the homepage, there's a clip of Evans explaining how to use the site and a carousel of "trending topics" (energy, charter schools, Hong Kong).
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The White House on Tuesday praised Facebook's response to allegations that it has deliberately omitted stories from conservative media on its popular "Trending Topics" feature.
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Last summer, with misinformation swirling about the death of Jeffrey Epstein, I joined the chorus of voices calling for an end to Twitter's trending topics.
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The biggest prize is to get on Twitter's Trending Topics list, which is often used as an assignment sheet for the rest of the internet.
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In August, Facebook reduced the role of a team dedicated to curating the site's Trending Topics, opting for automation over editorial judgment and handwritten headlines.
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Facebook announced on Monday afternoon that it would no longer be using other websites and media outlets to determine what belongs in the "Trending Topics" section.
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Facebook's Trending Topics—an innocuous-seeming little sidebar module that has become the seething epicenter of controversy over bias and fake news—is getting another reboot.
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The company fired its own curation team for a section of the site called Trending Topics, following Gizmodo's report on the potential suppression of conservative news.
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In August, a fake story claiming that Megyn Kelly had been kicked off Fox News for being a Hillary supporter spread via Facebook's "Trending Topics" section.
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The company fired its editorial team responsible for identifying trending topics earlier this year amid concerns that team members brought a political bias to the project.
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Timeliness is important for 90 Seconds' users, who have included Visa, Samsung and Microsoft, because they need to take advantage of trending topics and search terms.
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"Twitter trending topics last for maybe 6 hours, a backlash for 10 to 12 hours and then it goes and the herd moves on," said Froggatt.
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"Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature," the letter reads.
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But a Gizmodo report earlier this year said the social network routinely prevented stories with a conservative slant from appearing on the site's "trending topics" list.
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Aided by political Twitter bots mass retweeting these messages, the pro-Saudi hashtags would receive a boost, likely giving them traction locally among Saudi trending topics.
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Facebook has been forthcoming about with how it determines trending topics, and steps it will take to minimize the risk of bias from individual human judgment.
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Facebook has vigorously denied any ideological bias in the Trending Topics feed, even as many have pointed to the presence of human editors as inherently subjective.
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Last week, the Senate Commerce Committee opened an investigation into the allegations of bias in the Trending Topics board, which originated with an earlier Gizmodo report.
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There's also right-hand column for seeing friends' birthdays, event reminders, and trending topics, and an in-app browser for reading articles from the News Feed.
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Another change will also display the same topics to all users in a particular region, instead of giving each individual user their own personalized trending topics.
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The changes instituted on Friday didn't throw all of that away; Facebook has been slowly stripping away the human element of Trending Topics for months now.
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Before today, you could view individual tweets from a mobile web browser, but you couldn't view news stories or trending topics without logging into your account.
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It's been over a week since Gizmodo published allegations that editors for Facebook's trending topics section had omitted conservative stories and news sources from the list.
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Facebook last month laid off the Trending Topics team and said it would rely solely on algorithmic decision-making to surface trending stories across the site.
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Across social media and search, data and algorithms highlight trending topics or perform sentiment analysis, driving a lot of what is being covered, critiqued and seen.
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In May, the world's leading social media network changed its handling of trending topics after reports earlier guidelines may have favored news stories from mainstream outlets.
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By focusing on topics ranging from Saudi Arabia to the streetwear brand Supreme, the host can be relevant without having to weigh in on trending topics.
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The site devotes a prominent place to its list of trending topics—the most discussed phrases and hashtags of the moment, according to a proprietary algorithm.
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Within a day, MeToo remained on the list of trending topics but was labelled "currently being investigated", and soon related posts could no longer be searched.
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Sandberg said the conservative commentators were most concerned about how Trending Topics work — and how they can use the Facebook platform to reach the largest possible audience.
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You've got all those trending topics, so I'll always go on that page and just see what's going on in the news or scroll down my timeline.
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For example: the company wasn't exactly transparent about the curation behind its "Trending Topics," and then, subsequently firing human curators after a Gizmodo report exposed the process.
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As with many regular journalists, Dimitri starts his day by trawling the web looking for trending topics that he can harness to drive traffic to his websites.
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Gizmodo cited former Facebook "news curators," who claimed that fellow curators had routinely prevented stories with a conservative slant from appearing on the site's "trending topics" list.
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Facebook's Trending Topics has been a major source of controversy in recent months because of allegations that some of its editors had been downplaying conservative news outlets.
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Watch the full video, below: From Refinery29, After After Party invites comedians, celebrities, cultural critics, and you to dig into the trending topics you care most about.
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In May, Gizmodo reported that Facebook news curators admitted personal bias was allowed to influence the Trending Topics feed in the upper-right corner of the homepage.
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By deploying a phalanx of automated and semi-automated accounts, the group can flood popular trending topics and attract new audiences with a click of a button.
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Trending topics can also be removed (one at a time) until there are none left, resulting in an eerie question mark, drifting too close to module's border.
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The new documents show the precise instruction Facebook gave to its team of editors on how to choose which topics and publications to designate as Trending Topics.
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As in earlier stories, the new documents refer specifically to the Trending Topics system, and don't affect the stories that appear in a user's central News Feed.
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Earlier this year, Facebook moved quickly to address allegations its "Trending Topics" feature discriminated against right-leaning views, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg sitting down with prominent conservatives.
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Thune sent a letter to Facebook last week to demand that it explain its editorial decision-making and how stories are chosen for the "trending topics" feature.
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"The Trending Topics episode paralyzed Facebook's willingness to make any serious changes to its products that might compromise the perception of its objectivity," employees told the Times.
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No doubt, Facebook has done a remarkable job of finding new ways to keep people on the site, from more relevant newsfeeds to trending topics to video.
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The way it initially handled this month's flare-up over accusations of political bias in its Trending Topics feed can only lead to this answer: not very.
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Only after The Guardian newspaper obtained an old copy of the Trending Topics guidelines did Facebook provide more information, and an up-to-date copy of them.
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The service lets users stream hundreds of different... Promising indies, unconventional horror, and new hope for franchises It's been a rough few days for Facebook's Trending Topics.
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In the case of Trending Topics, when enough people share a story — fake or odious or not — the algorithm deems it important and promotes it in popularity.
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While it's not quite the powerful News Feed, the trending topics section still drives traffic and the mere perception of bias is a dangerous thing for Facebook.
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But it was actually the hashtag that included the commander in chief's name — #TrumpShutdown — that shot to the top of Twitter's "Worldwide" trending topics on Friday night.
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Sure seems so, at least to Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, who touched on the recent controversy surrounding Facebook's trending topics on his show on Thursday night.
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This product also has a team of people who play an important role in making sure that what appears in Trending Topics is high-quality and useful.
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Facebook justified its decision to eliminate human editors last week by saying that the move was necessary in order to scale Trending topics to a broader audience.
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It's gone now, replaced by an "Explore" section that combines trending topics, and a bit of those Moments collections of popular stories, and the app's search function.
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Human intervention was necessary at several steps of the process — and it's easy to see how Trending Topics broke down when humans were removed from the system.
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Just days after announcing changes to how it handles its Trending Topics section, a fake article about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was found trending on Facebook.
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A recent Wired profile of Facebook detailed how the platform's Trending Topics team became a lightning rod of criticism over the perception that it suppressed conservative views.
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She is likely to face questions during this trip about recent allegations that Facebook downplayed news stories and sources popular with conservatives in its Trending Topics feature.
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There's no evidence that Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else in Facebook's leadership made a conscious decision to skew the trending topics box in a left-wing direction.
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People spend most of their time interacting not with the trending topics box at the right of the screen but with the news feed in the center.
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Imagine an Instagram centered entirely around its "Explore" tab, or a Twitter built around, I guess, trending topics or viral tweets, with "following" bolted onto the side.
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Twitter's blog post, while not quite directly attributing any activity to those accounts, discussed what the company does to combat issues like gaming Trending Topics and automating spam.
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Memes and trending topics come and go, but one truth remains eternal: If you want to start an argument on Twitter, declare that an art form is dead.
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At the time of this writing Thursday afternoon, the topic was near the top of Twitter's trending topics even though it wasn't on Facebook's list of top trends.
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The meeting came after tech blog Gizmodo said Facebook suppressed pro-conservative stories and forced others to artificially appear in the social media site's influential "trending topics" list.
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Facebook emphasized that the news tab is not a reincarnation of the company's now-defunct trending topics news section, which ranked news topics and links based on popularity.
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And politically minded engineers like Microchip, a pro-Trump figure who's notorious on Twitter, orchestrated automated networks of Twitter accounts to help push trending topics and advance narratives.
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Check out the full discussion here: From Refinery29, After After Party invites comedians, celebrities, cultural critics, and you to dig into the trending topics you care most about.
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To that end, it built a special sports chatter feature called Stadium, has focused on Facebook Live for citizen journalism, and has iterated on its Trending Topics feature.
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Whatever you do, they agreed, do NOT click on trending topics, which appeared to mostly have to do with video games: Nintendo, Mario Kart, the beloved character Toad.
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It isn't always neutral I take Facebook at its word when it says it wasn't manipulating Trending Topics — its business heavily incentivizes it not to operate that way.
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Gawker Media is known for a lot of great stories, Denton said (like Gizmodo's coverage of Facebook trending topics), but some of them may have missed the mark.
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The optics were made all the worse by the fact that Facebook spent the previous weeks trying to calm an outcry over possible bias in its Trending Topics.
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Facebook might be distorting our sense of reality and creating an uninformed, hyper-partisan citizenry with its automated feeds and trending topics, but it's also making record profits.
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They decided the effort, called Trending Topics and until then a pilot operation by a dozen or so staff members, should be doubled to more than 30 people.
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She'll be interviewed by Arthur Brooks, the think tank's president and an attendee at a meeting Facebook held with influential conservatives to tamp down the Trending Topics controversy.
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Facebook's Trending Topics, the feature that drew all the attention last week, is relegated to a small box in desktop browsers and users' search page on mobile devices.
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Khan's uncanny resemblance to the GOP presidential nominee's spouse made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic and quickly shot up the trending topics list on social media.
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In May 2016, a report on Gizmodo claimed that, according to unnamed former employees, Facebook's "news curators" conspired to suppress conservative news from the platform's Trending Topics section.
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The company came under fire this year for faults in its Trending Topics feature, which surfaced some of the most talked-about stories and topics circulating on Facebook.
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The series, which will run during the summer, gives viewers a rundown of what to know about recent trending topics as well as a look at what's ahead.
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China is also the key market for South Korean pop culture exports, with soap operas and pop music regular hogging the trending topics list on the Weibo microblog.
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And it trended multiple times on Facebook and Twitter — an uncommon feat for a game competing with more widely well-known trending topics like Beyoncé and Captain America.
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Facebook is giving up on human-written headlines for its Trending Topics sidebar, three months after a Gizmodo report alleged that the site was suppressing conservative news sources.
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It's not the kind of buzz that guarantees awards, but it certainly puts Marriage Story at the top of Twitter's trending topics—for a few hours, at least.
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For its part, Facebook said on Wednesday it had made changes to its Trending Topics feature, which prominently shows what is popular on Facebook at a given time.
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It has been more than three months since Gizmodo first published a story claiming Facebook's human editors were suppressing conservative news content on the site's Trending Topics section.
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Facebook denied the report, but spent a good portion of the year tweaking its trending section to fight off the perception that its trending topics feature is biased.
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She'll engage in trending topics only if she has something to add, an image and a great quote, or a video clip short enough to not get pulled.
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But the values list also arrives just a month after Facebook came under attack following a Gizmodo report that Facebook was suppressing conservative news in its trending topics section.
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In August, Facebook laid off employees that curated popular news on the network's "trending topics" section, amid accusations that the workers' selections were biased against conservative U.S. news outlets.
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The Wired profile traces Facebook's fake news problems back to a series of Gizmodo reports from 2016 about the employees who worked on Facebook's now-defunct "Trending Topics" feature.
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It separates conversations about Wimbledon from conversations about other sports going on right now — like the Euro 2016 soccer tournament — and pinpoints and highlights trending topics about Wimbledon itself.
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The company had found itself under pressure after Gizmodo reported that the editors who then worked for Facebook "routinely suppressed conservative news" from its since-abandoned Trending Topics module.
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" This is a simple version of the story that has been established internet lore / media theory for several years, and still applies to modern trending topics like "Hotline Bling.
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Mark Zuckerberg has kicked off a probe into claims Facebook suppressed pro-conservative stories and forced others to artificially appear in the social media site's influential "trending topics" list.
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What they do: Based in the US, but with a London office, Crimson Hexagon specialises in social media analytics, with a particular focus on current events and trending topics.
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This issue, the Trending Topics issue, the reason we are supposed to be up in arms, is a relatively new product that Facebook readily admits is far from perfect.
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WMT Price data by YCharts Minutes after Amazon announced the Whole Foods deal, Instacart's name also popped into Twitter's trending topics as a brief moment of schadenfreude took hold.
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The move "will make the product more automated and will no longer require people inside Facebook to write descriptions for trending topics," the company noted in a blog post.
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Facebook is doing the right thing by continuing to iterate, applying the lessons learned from improving News Feed to making Trending Topics as useful for its audience as possible.
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Facebook will no longer rely on external news websites or RSS feeds to "identify, validate, or assess the importance of trending topics" according to a statement from the company.
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Facebook has been under fire recently over allegations that some of the contractors working on its "Trending Topics" had prevented conservative media outlets from showing up in the section.
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Notice how trending topics have been moved to the right, and the rest of the options are along the left side instead of at the top of the screen.
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Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is meeting with Glenn Beck and other leading conservatives this week to discuss allegations of political bias in the social network's Trending Topics section.
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Perhaps the only fireworks during the testimony came when Senator Ted Cruz laid into Zuckerberg over the Gizmodo report citing that Facebook's trending topics curators suppressed conservative news trends.
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Earlier this year, a former editor for the company's trending topics section anonymously alleged that some members of that team had suppressed news stories and source popular with conservatives.
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Yank up Trending Topics' roots the way Facebook did with Messenger, and transplant it in a new context where media outlets aren't your friends and friends aren't your media.
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In 2016 it fired its skeletal editorial staff—the people responsible for selecting Facebook's highly coveted "trending topics"—after former staffers revealed that they suppressed news from conservative sites.
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That's because Facebook has been skittish ever since a 2016 Gizmodo report revealed that Facebook employees curating its "Trending Topics" suppressed conservative sites like The Daily Caller and Breitbart.
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Conservatives screamed bloody murder and Facebook ended up firing all of the curators who worked on "Trending Topics" and replacing them with algorithms—a move that had disastrous consequences.
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The investigation ultimately turned up no evidence of systemic bias in trending topics, according to the company, but nonetheless resulted in changes to the way the feature was operated.
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In May, it grappled with reports that editors of its Trending Topics — which displays some of the most talked-about stories on the social network — were suppressing conservative content.
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What's more, after the Gizmodo allegations, Facebook's own internal investigation that same month had analyzed the data and found "no evidence of systematic political bias" in the trending topics.
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Clearly, Monday's remarks will set back Trump for the next few weeks but, in today's age of quick news cycles and trending topics on social media, he will survive.
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In the future, Slack could start using its data to spot trending topics across companies and even draw attention to channels where a conversation is suddenly spiking, Weiss said.
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Plenty of people expressed dismay as they noticed the hashtag among trending topics like "Alexandria," where the shooting took place, or "Grenfell Tower," where the deadly fire took place.
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Mark Zuckerberg addressed accusations that Facebook's trending topics cycle suppressed issues important to conservative users on Thursday, saying that an investigation had found no evidence to support those claims.
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The company has continued to beat back allegations of bias after a Gizmodo report from earlier this year said humans on the Trending Topics team were suppressing conservative news.
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Facebook, for instance, previously had a team of trained news editors who chose which stories appeared in its trending topics section, a huge driver of traffic to news stories.
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That declaration comes on the heels of a Gizmodo story from Monday morning reporting that Facebook's human curators censor conservative news stories from appearing in the Trending Topics section.
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Las injurias que antes se leían en las paredes de los urinarios ahora son trending topics, y los haters, los bots y los trolls integran la trinidad del linchamiento.
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There were more than 20 billion social media impressions as #GivingTuesday was among the top trending topics on Twitter through most of that day, according to the Nonprofit Times.
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WHITE HOUSE WEIGHS IN: The White House on Tuesday praised Facebook's response to allegations that it has deliberately omitted stories from conservative media on its popular "Trending Topics" feature.
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But Facebook has slowly gotten more publisher-like, doing things like paying media companies to create video content or letting employees sift through trending topics and write story headlines.
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There's been examples of where lists dependent upon data have backfired, such as what happened to Facebook's Trending Topics after the company fired its editors for the section last year.
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Today, Facebook announced an update to its Trending Topics section that will make the list of news stories easier to parse on mobile with a more diverse list of sources.
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We're not going to talk about any trending topics today or hammer home the theme but we thought we'd spend the first segment of the show talking about our feelings.
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Therefore, things got a bit murky when Facebook was accused of being politically biased about its "Trending Topics" module, a component that is at least partly powered by machine learning.
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In mid-2016, the social network was grappling with criticism that its Trending Topics team of editors was choosing to feature left-leaning content and leaving out right-leaning posts.
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Members of the channel also swarmed real, already-trending hashtags like #KanzlerDuell ("chancellor debate") and #TVDuell ("TV debate"), pushing right-wing fan art into already-trending topics on German Twitter.
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"Global companies can now use Sprinklr to listen to what customers are saying, analyze trending topics, and manage Reddit customer care directly through the Sprinklr platform," reads a press release.
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The new section also gives stories a rank (#1, #2, #3,…etc.) Facebook's prior announcement in May didn't specifically detail how this Trending News section looked different from Trending Topics.
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For example, you could have the link to Trending News in your app's main navigation, but still not have the new look for Trending Topics, which includes the carousel redesign.
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For nearly two weeks, Facebook has been at the center of a media firestorm about whether its "human editors" have been inappropriately tampering with the "Trending Topics" seen by millions.
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In a post today, Facebook search VP Tom Stocky explains that human editors actually have a key role in determining what gets placed in the News Feed's Trending Topics box.
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Mark Zuckerberg has issued a statement in response to the controversy alleging that Facebook staff intentionally prevented stories with a conservative viewpoint from appearing in the site's Trending Topics section.
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Facebook has responded to allegations in a Gizmodo report that its contract news curators actively censored stories from conservative publications when selecting which items appear in its Trending Topics section.
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However, a Facebook spokesperson did say the company does not "permit the suppression of political perspectives" and has never banned a news outlet from appearing in the Trending Topics bar.
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On social media, "#NotMyPresident" continued to trend on Wednesday, as new hashtags such as "#TrumpProtest" and mentions of "6th Ave" and "Columbus Circle" began to climb up the trending topics.
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Twitter's autosuggested trending hashtags are both a great way to get a snapshot of the day's news AND a great tool for spammers who love to ride trending topics. pic.twitter.
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The alleged censorship concerns a feature on Facebook's desktop version called "trending topics", which relies on curators to help select the news items to highlight in one section of Facebook.
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Instead, these people said, Trending Topics was a fledgling, ill-managed group — made up largely of recent college graduates with little work experience — where individual judgment of news was encouraged.
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The 28-page document details how both editors and computer algorithms play roles in the process of picking what should appear in the "Trending Topics" section of users' Facebook pages.
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Facebook has acknowledged that "curators" work on the trending topics team with a set of guidelines to determine what people see, but it argues politics does not play a role.
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The update comes several months after Twitter first replaced its Moments tab on mobile with a new "explore" section that highlights live video and trending topics in addition to Moments.
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Facebook featured a farcical news story in its popular "Trending Topics" section on Monday that reported popular prime-time Fox News host Megyn Kelly had been fired from the organization.
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It's also baking Live videos into its Trends in search, and will show when there's a Live video broadcasting related to one of its Trending Topics on the home page.
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The accusations stem from a report published by Gizmodo on Monday, alleging that Facebook artificially doctored its trending topics list to prevent stories of interest to conservative users from appearing.
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The accusations stem from a report published by Gizmodo on Monday, alleging that Facebook artificially doctored its Trending Topics list to prevent stories of interest to conservative users from appearing.
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It could be that Reddit is hoping to attract some attention to its app in the wake of Facebook pulling Trending Topics – its news discovery feature – from its social network.
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Although Facebook has made clear it wants to leave complex decisions up to its algorithms, the plummeting quality of Trending Topics makes it clear that the algorithm isn't ready yet.
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While not overtly about technology or the internet, its opening sequence plays like a Flickr reel or Twitter Trending Topics list, showing many walks of life on the planet today.
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He said his role was to create trending topics during key election moments, using hashtags and content provided by his agency in combination with his personal fake accounts, he said.
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Facebook could get rid of its Trending topics feature tomorrow and this would still be a question worth asking, because so many of us get updates from our News Feed.
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On Friday, Facebook announced another small but notable change to Trending Topics: Human editors will no longer write the short story descriptions that accompany a trending topic on the site.
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August saw the social network laid off employees that curated popular news on the site's "trending topics" section, amid accusations that the workers' selections were biased against conservative U.S. news outlets.
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In February of 2016, just as the Trending Topics fiasco was building up steam, Roger McNamee became one of the first Facebook insiders to notice strange things happening on the platform.
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Management was gun-shy because of the Trending Topics fiasco; taking action against partisan disinformation—or even identifying it as such—might have been seen as another act of political favoritism.
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On January 25, Facebook announced that it would modify its trending topics algorithm to promote vetted news stories, as opposed to only promoting articles that are popular within a social network.
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The U.K. newspaper The Guardian on Thursday published what it said were internal Facebook guidelines that showed the extent to which human curators could shape the computer-generated trending topics list.
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It's been five months since Facebook removed editorial descriptions from its Trending Topics box, transforming it from a personalized guide to the day's news to a context-free list of keywords.
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This is testing to a small number of people in the US. It's fairly clear that this "new way" to display Trending Topics doesn't involve humans writing headlines or synopses anymore.
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Democrats chanted "No bill, no break!" as the protest got underway, and supporters and celebrities alike joined the effort via social media, making the #NoBillNoBreak hashtag one of Twitter's trending topics. .
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By crunching data from the Twitter accounts, the groups say, researchers can take the pulse of online hate in real time, then relay information on trending topics and sources of discussion.
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The article shot to the top of the Trending Topics section, outpacing other (real) stories like Kanye's VMA speech and video premiere, Anthony Weiner's latest sexting scandal, and Beyoncé's VMA performance.
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If you are a content farm, the game was to get as many likes as possible for your page, post more stories, engage trending topics, and embed videos within the platform.
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"We're not interested in adding our point of view" One of the more surprising things Cathcart told me is that the News Feed and Trending Topics are run by separate teams.
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Facebook could not exclude the possibility of unintentional bias The changes to Facebook's Trending Topics section come in response to an inquiry opened by the Senate Commerce Committee earlier this month.
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And while Facebook says it takes steps to prevent "false or misleading content from appearing" in its Trending topics, several fake stories have done just that over the past few months.
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Facebook says it stripped down Trending Topics to help scale it to more users around the world, something it can't do when it has to pick headlines and write descriptions manually.
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Facebook could create a more personalized Trending Topics list to avoid future failures The other, more sensible option is to improve its safeguards and maybe create a more personalized Trending list.
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The data shows Mueller continued to be one of the most trending topics during last week's House committee hearings when Mueller generated 85033 million social media interactions between Monday and Friday.
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The poll comes as Facebook looks to fend off allegations that an anti-conservative bias skewed the stories in its trending topics section, which is produced in part by human editors.
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It would be irresponsible of Facebook to facilitate the spread of birther nonsense or September 11 conspiracy theories by letting an algorithm pull such stories into trending topics without override power.
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The hashtag #RouanetNão or "Not Rouanet" hit Brazil's trending topics on Twitter in September and created a wave of backlash that painted artists as freeloaders who live off of public funds.
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Earlier this year, Facebook admitted that some of its employees may have shown bias against conservatives in the way they curated the news in the trending topics section of the site.
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Facebook told Reuters on Monday that there are "rigorous guidelines in place" to maintain neutrality and said that these guidelines do not prohibit any news outlet from appearing in trending topics.
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The US Senate Commerce Committee is asking Facebook for answers after a Gizmodo report alleged that the company's news curators have been deliberately suppressing conservative news from surfacing in its Trending Topics.
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Others claimed that they were explicitly instructed by their managers at Facebook to manipulate the trending topics algorithm by inserting topics into the module before they had gathered momentum among Facebook users.
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As BuzzFeed News has reported, MicroChip, "a notorious pro-Trump Twitter ringleader," has and continues to orchestrate automated networks of Twitter accounts to help push trending topics and advance pro-Trump narratives.
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And then there are the trending topics algorithms, which do not care why people share things, just that they share things, as polluted information cyclones across platforms, accruing strength as it travels.
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It's still not entirely clear how much impact human editors have on what appears in Trending Topics versus what doesn't, but Thune's statement says quite clearly that humans are pretty heavily involved.
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This week, what would have been Facebook's first satellite was destroyed in a Falcon 9 explosion, Facebook changed its Trending Topics layout and new information about the Dropbox password breach was unveiled.
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A new poll by Morning Consult shows Americans still largely trust Facebook to deliver their news, despite a recent allegation that the company regularly suppressed conservative news in the Trending Topics bar.
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"Facebook has been forthcoming about how it determines trending topics and steps it will take to minimize the risk of bias from individual human judgment," Thune wrote in a statement published today.
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In his own post, Mark Zuckerberg said that there's no ideological bias in Trending Topics, and that he plans to talk to people all across the political spectrum to prove he's serious.
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In May 2016, Facebook changed the procedures behind its "Trending Topics" section after a news report alleged that the company had suppressed conservative news and a Republican U.S. senator demanded more transparency.
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Until August, Facebook's trending topics were curated by a special team of staffers whose main task was to vet the site's news algorithm and identify whether stories it picked up were news.
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Currently, Bixby exists as a piece of software on the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus that provides at-a-glance information at news, trending topics on Twitter, upcoming events and more.
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The company faced further problems after it terminated the editorial team responsible for trending topics in favor of an automated selection, only to find that fake stories were being delivered to users.
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How Facebook handled a contractor's leaks: Benjamin Fearnow, a journalist working as a contractor on the site's Trending Topics team, was fired after leaking internal communications to then-Gizmodo reporter Michael Nuñez.
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SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said on Monday that an internal investigation found no evidence of systemic political bias in the selection of news presented in a section of its app called Trending Topics.
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On May 9, the news site Gizmodo quoted anonymous sources who claimed to be former Facebook journalists, alleging that curators "routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers" in Trending Topics.
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"As we investigate, we will also keep reviewing our operational practices around Trending Topics — and if we find they are inadequate, we will take immediate steps to fix them," the spokesperson said.
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But Facebook users who rarely notice the Trending Topics feed may be scratching their heads at the hubbub over such little links, when the real action on Facebook is in its newsfeed.
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Tens of thousands of Saudis joined the clerics in critiquing Comic Con and the GEA, elevating the hashtag "a new disaster for entertainment in Riyadh" to Twitter's list of trending topics there.
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He pointed to other features he said have yet to inflect user numbers, such as Moments, an icon that reveals a snapshot of reactions to trending topics, and integration with Google Search.
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Many of the key Republicans who were concerned about the reports of bias among the trending topics editors say they think the company can handle the fake news issue on their own.
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Facebook's controversial Trending topics feature is sacrificing support for niche interests in favor of an internationally scalable approach that could create nationwide digital water cooler moments you can read at a glance.
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On the same day, Facebook introduced changes to its Trending Topics feature — a part of the social network that some have blamed for spreading false information — to better promote reliable news articles.
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It was revealed in April 2016, for example, that Facebook was employing a small team of contractors to vet its "trending topics," providing quality control such as weeding out blatant fake news.
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Authorities were also censoring potentially sensitive items on social media such as Weibo, China's Twitter-like service, where trade-related items have been mostly kept off the list of top trending topics.
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Since 2016, when a former curator alleged that Facebook's Trending Topics feature had an anti-conservative bias, Republicans have latched onto worries about censorship as one of their top tech-related concerns.
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And months after the social network landed in hot water over a supposed anti-conservative bias in its "Trending Topics" module, how does Facebook decide what's "conservative" and what's "liberal" (or "very liberal")?
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Facebook has come under fire for its Trending Topics section, which highlights news stories that are being discussed on the platform, after reports that the section's editors may have suppressed conservative news outlets.
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One source at the company told me in 2014 that Trending Topics leaned on "human editors" to pick headlines and news topics, but that was clearly not the external perception until this month.
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Fearnow, a recent graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, worked in Facebook's New York office on something called Trending Topics, a feed of popular news subjects that popped up when people opened Facebook.
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Then it sent him a 12-page single-spaced letter explaining that it had conducted a thorough review of Trending Topics and determined that the allegations in the Gizmodo story were largely false.
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The most important consequence of the Trending Topics controversy, according to nearly a dozen former and current employees, was that Facebook became wary of doing anything that might look like stifling conservative news.
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Twitter also says it uses algorithmic methods to determine which hashtags show up in its trending topics section, which guard against attempts to spoof the system with high volumes of low-quality traffic.
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Macy's slump drags department stores closer to the grave Zuckerberg probes claims Facebook cut trending topics Two of the four 22-year-olds will graduate summa cum laude and one, magna cum laude.
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The company laid off a group of editors in 2016 after a controversy over its Trending Topics items and replaced them with an algorithm that automatically surfaces the top news of the day.
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Facebook has changed Trending Topics to rely on algorithms to surface and sort news, the company announced on Friday, just months after the section was the center of controversy over alleged editor bias.
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Under Explore, users first get a look at "today's picks," which is a set of personalized recommendations in addition to the top trending topics on Pinterest during the day based on search trends.
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"Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature," Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch wrote in a statement today.
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In a post today, Facebook VP Justin Osofsky revealed more detail than ever before about the company's Trending Topics product, which faced accusations of liberal bias from a former employee earlier this week.
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Facebook's confab with conservatives came a couple weeks after a pair of reports in Gizmodo that cast doubt on the content of Trending Topics, a roundup of stories popular on the social network.
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But then, in late August — just as the election cycle hit its peak — Facebook fired its news curation team, announcing that it was adopting "a more algorithmically driven process" for managing trending topics.
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" In a possible slight to Gizmodo, which accused Facebook of suppressing conservative trending topics based on information from anonymous sources, one of Facebook's fake examples of clickbait comes from a site called "Gizmotecho.
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As we reported this morning, she's going to face questions about last month's allegations that the company systematically downplayed conservative content and sources on its Trending Topics feature –- claims which it has denied.
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The feature was previously only available in the US and Japan, but now, more people than ever before can browse news and trending topics on the service whether they're logged in or not.
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Facebook has been under pressure since last week, when Gizmodo published a report quoting a former "curator" for Facebook's trending topics section saying that their colleagues had suppressed conservative news stories and sources.
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The social networking giant took fire in recent months over allegations that human editors systematically buried stories and sources popular with conservatives in the Trending Topics module, which the company has denied repeatedly.
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Some of the highest-profile allegations of bias, about Facebook's Trending Topics section and Twitter's Moments feature, have focused on the very small portion of those platforms curated by humans rather than algorithms.
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Sure, if you've got some niche interests like an extreme sport, geeky academic pursuit, or B-list celebrity, the new Trending Topics will be able to show you more hashtags about them now.
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The change seems to have made the problem worse — earlier this year, Facebook redesigned the trending topics section again, after complaints that hoaxes and fake news stories were showing up in users' feeds.
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So many people had taken to social media to remember Mr. Gayle on Friday that for some of the afternoon "Tyrone" and "#GayleNation" were trending topics on Twitter in the Washington region. Mrs.
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Contractors who worked as "curators" for Facebook's trending topics section, which can bring significant attention to news stories, regularly didn't include stories trending among political conservatives, according to a Monday report from Gizmodo.
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The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation asked Facebook Chairman and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg in a letter to answer questions about the company's news curation practices and its trending topics section.
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"If you have a stated policy, which your followers or your audience knows to be the case, that you use an objective algorithm for trending topics — you better follow that policy," Thune said.
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They felt less like the work of corporate marketing executives and more like they'd been blended together by some sentient algorithm that plucked a bunch of trending topics from random common Google searches.
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Facebook may be trying to get rid of any alleged bias in its recently controversial Trending Topics feature by getting rid of the human oversight that may have caused bias in the first place.
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Last summer when controversy erupted about Facebook allegedly censoring conservative news viewpoints from its Trending Topics module, Facebook's response was to fire the human editors overseeing the project and increase its reliance algorithms instead.
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And you can learn more about the trending topics you've been chatting about, as Tribe's "magic Words" feature will automatically send a link with news/updates if you've mentioned a celebrity or breaking story.
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The company spent a healthy chunk of last year tweaking Trending Topics after a controversy over liberal bias, which sparked fierce debates about Facebook's editorial influence in the run up to the US election.
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The only real obstacle to pushing fake news, dark ads, and inflated trending topics for Mexico's politicians, Merlo said during BuzzFeed News' initial visit, has been getting government employees to pay him on time.
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Recently the review process for Facebook's trending topics — that little list of newsy links that everybody sees on the upper right side of their feeds — came under fire for allegedly suppressing conservative news stories.
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This follows the company's earlier announcement this spring of a redesign for Trending Topics, an increasingly important part of Facebook's social network, where it tracks the news stories that are buzzing across its service.
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As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook's algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section.
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In this week's Ctrl-Walt-Delete, Walt and Nilay discuss the repercussions of Facebook becoming a part of nearly everyone's life, as well as brands' Facebook pages and "Trending Topics" on your home page.
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Trending Topics shows up as the list of the most-talked-about items of interest on Facebook, and appears in the top right corner of the desktop site for hundreds of millions of users.
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The Silicon Valley company published results of the internal investigation and its changes in a letter to Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, who had earlier demanded answers about how Trending Topics works.
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Instead, the company's Trending Topics team was characterized as having a problematic culture made up largely of contract journalists, some of whom said there was a lack of oversight from and communication with management.
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"We asked, do we consider ourselves Facebook journalists?" said Benjamin Fearnow, a former news curator at Facebook who worked on Trending Topics for close to a year, until April, and who attended the meeting.
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Facebook has worked hard to do damage control, releasing documents and information about how trending topics are selected, an uncommon act of openness for a company that holds its cards close to the vest.
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While one former contractor did tell Gizmodo in 2016 that the site's curation of "trending topics" had a "chilling effect on conservative news," these curators were attempting to enforce a set of journalistic standards.
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The New York Times pointed out that on Facebook's trending topics bar, its link to news on the Las Vegas shooting showed users a story published by Sputnik, a Russian state-owned news outlet.
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Just look at what happened last week after that Goliath of the digital transformation, Facebook, pared back the team of "curators" and copy editors who oversaw the selection process for its "Trending Topics" feed.
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Google recently released its list of the year's top trending topics and it may come as little surprise that "how to buy bitcoin" was one of the tasks people searched for most in 29.
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While it was later discovered that this was largely due to individual judgement, not institutional bias, the company took the heavy-handed measure of letting the entire team of Trending Topics news curators go.
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Facebook's News Feed team has been reeling since a report earlier this year argued that a team of contractors responsible for the feed's Trending Topics module routinely suppressed news of interest to political conservatives.
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The hashtag #SheTheNorth shot to the top of Canada's trending topics on Twitter, as social media users reimagined the "We the North" slogan used by the Toronto Raptors during their NBA championship-winning run.
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The match dominated Twitter trending topics in the United States for long after its conclusion, with celebrities such as Dan Rather, Ellen DeGeneres and George Takei declaring their allegiance to soccer's Stars and Stripes.
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In a Facebook post published Thursday night, Zuckerberg said Facebook has found no evidence that its employees have been intentionally suppressing conservative content in its Trending Topics section, as was alleged in a recent report.
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By now young people watch a lot more video on non-TV screens, and the next big thing can come and go in the time it takes it to fall off Twitter's Trending Topics list.
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My colleague Peter Kafka points out that this means humans are still responsible for picking the trending headlines, and that a little more bias could make Facebook's notoriously stale trending topics a little more lively.
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So in 2017, we'll be rounding up some of the top trends, stories and headlines every month, as well as offering our predictions on future trending topics that are on the verge of taking off.
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"The most important consequence of the Trending Topics controversy, according to nearly a dozen former and current employees, was that Facebook became wary of doing anything that might look like stifling conservative news," wrote Wired.
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The show writers are quickly moving through the list of trending topics for women in media, and last night's episode touched on a subject that hits particularly close to home: online harassment from anonymous men.
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The social network is struggling to contain a massive harassment problem and to deal with political actors who expertly game its trending topics to spread propaganda as major national elections are coming up next year.
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It's unclear how much is in the memo itself — even the FBI hasn't seen it — but it didn't stop skeptics from rallying behind the cause, launching #releasethememo into trending topics on both Twitter and Facebook.
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But the fact that Facebook may have shaded the truth about trending topics doesn't obligate anyone to give conspiracy-mongers with a rooting interest in stirring up right-wing anger the benefit of the doubt.
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That could take troubling forms; look no further than Facebook cowing to conservative pressure and abandoning oversight of Trending Topics, which let unvetted stories run rampant on the platform leading up to the 2016 election.
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After the Paris attacks, millions of tweets flooded the social platform within the first few hours, and one of the trending topics was a debate over whether there is an association between Islam and terrorism.
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The issue of fake news on social media grabbed national attention earlier this summer, when Gizmodo reported that the team at Facebook responsible for its Trending Topics news list was suppressing links from conservative sources.
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If Facebook won't change its algorithms for fear of going against its wildly successful revenue model or expand its Trending Topics product, it needs to implement better features to help diversify the content we see.
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That's when the social network is scheduled to hold a meeting with leading Republican pundits and politicians to walk them through how it decides which articles to show on a news feature called Trending Topics.
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Breitbart News for a time on Friday morning focused the top nine stories on its homepage to the verdict, and the hashtag #BoycottSanFrancisco became one of the top trending topics in the US on Twitter.
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Engineers working on machine learning have told me they estimate it would take a dedicated team more than a year to train an algorithm to properly do the work Facebook is attempting with Trending Topics.
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The company is in hot water over allegations leveled last week in a Gizmodo article that Facebook employees had omitted stories and news sources popular among conservatives from the social media platform's "trending" topics section.
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On Twitter on Tuesday, #NotMyPrimeMinister, #MorrisonMustGo and #ScoMoResign were the top trending topics in Australia after a viral video showed a volunteer firefighter, Jacqui, shaking hands with Morrison as she said "not my prime minister".
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That said, governments and politicians alike must understand the importance of tracking social media sentiment and keeping up to speed with trending topics to ensure an alignment with what the masses deem worthy of consumption.
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The news that Facebook may have been manipulating the trending topics box has rocketed around the conservative internet, generating a volume of bad press that has to hurt even for a company of Facebook's size.
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Smollett's attack was horrendous, but we can still acknowledge that there are many more QTPOC whose stories are not splashed across the landing pages of websites, whose names are not hashtags or trending topics on Twitter.
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The information on candidates and issues isn't created by Facebook, which likely wants to avoid allegations of partisanship after its Trending Topics feature was accused of bias against conservative news outlets earlier in the election cycle.
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" A Twitter spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, "Any use of automation to game Trending Topics is in violation of the Twitter Rules, and we have had measures in place to address this since the spring of 2014.
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Facebook, which has born the brunt of this backlash, repeatedly surfaced demonstrably false news stories in its trending topics section in the months leading up to the election — a disproportionate number from right-wing conspiracy sites.
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It's not news that the Trending Topics section had used human moderators, but the notion that they were able to pick and choose news pieces — not expressly following the algorithm — comes as somewhat of a shock.
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The site just got a major redesign that didn't add the ability to edit tweets but instead focused on moving things like "trending topics" around and making it easier to join conversations and manage direct messages.
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Image: GettyThe US Senate Commerce Committee—which has jurisdiction over media issues, consumer protection issues, and internet communication—has sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg requesting answers to questions it has on its trending topics section.
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This week's controversy over how Facebook programs its Trending Topics section has highlighted the company's growing power over the distribution of news — and the fear that it might one day use that power toward partisan ends.
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The rapper's name quickly rose to the top of the list of trending topics, and a handful of corporate accounts saw an easy opportunity to inject some goofy product-centric jokes and memes of their own.
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To combat that, the company will make some changes to how Trending Topics functions, including eliminating the list of external media sites and RSS feeds to judge which material should be shown as trending across Facebook.
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Facebook is trying to bat down concerns that it suppressed conservative articles in Trending Topics, accusations that appeared in a report on Gizmodo last week and that have since fueled a reaction against the social network.
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But this is the latest in a number of inaccurate, inappropriate, or outright hoax stories to have appeared in Trending Topics over the past few weeks, since Facebook automated large parts of its news-gathering operation.
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FORMER FACEBOOK CONTRACTOR PENS OP-ED: A former Facebook contractor who says she worked on the company's "Trending Topics" feature published a column in The Guardian describing the workplace as a toxic environment with heavy turnover.
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On Monday morning, the day after the pilot episode of HBO's new comic-book-inspired series "Watchmen" premiered, one of the top trending topics on Twitter in the US was the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
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But it is easy to imagine how a conservative Facebooker might see his coworkers manipulating Facebook trending topics, and walk away convinced of a conspiracy exactly like the one the right imagines unfolded at the IRS.
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But he conceded that the product needs to improve its ability to block fake news, and says tech that Facebook built to squash hoaxes in the News Feed is being rolled out to Trending Topics now.
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Facebook to roll out tech for combating fake stories in its Trending topics Europe's top court to weigh in on Facebook privacy 'class action' Facebook employees say deleting 'napalm girl' photo was a mistake etc, etc.
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Facebook also released a press statement on Thursday outlining how Trending Topics works and addressing specific claims made in the Gizmodo report, including that Facebook was able to inject subjects into the list or blacklist others.
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" Erickson's bigger point is that any bias Facebook has against conservatives is likely to be accidental and a result of hiring "news editors who help shape the trending topics who are New Yorkers or millennial liberals.
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It was not clear whether the email about trending topics that breached the suppression order originated at the company's operations in New Zealand or in another country, and whether it fell within New Zealand's legal jurisdiction.
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The decision to include a segment on political biases was sparked by allegations, which Facebook says are unfounded, that editors for the social network's trending topics feature systematically downplayed news stories and sources popular with conservatives.
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But he also said they had qualms with Facebook's positions on privacy and intellectual property and the fact that Facebook employees, including the executive whose division includes the trending topics feature, have donated to progressive candidates.
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The controversy comes at a time when Facebook's journalistic credentials are nearing an all-time low, particularly as its real-time Trending Topics section continues to produce fake stories after the company fired its editorial curators.
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That's the case with the defendant in the Millane trial, whose name broke in the British media before it made its way into an automatically generated Google newsletter on trending topics sent to people in New Zealand.
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Twitter users responded to an Islamic State video, released on Wednesday, by turning the young Spanish-speaking jihadist in to a meme that was among the social media site's most popular "trending topics" on Thursday and Friday.
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Most damning were the accusations by former workers that some trending stories were suppressed if they didn't agree with the political views of the contracted curators controlling the trending topics feed — especially if the stories were conservative.
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Gizmodo captured the attention of the media world on Monday with a post that alleged contractors who worked on Facebook's trending topics section had purposefully blocked conservative media outlets from appearing in the trending news story list.
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When it comes to the distribution of news, the company's off-hands approach has allowed outright lies to spread among its users, as evidenced by the rise of hoax stories in the News Feed's trending topics section.
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Former news curators who spoke to Gizmodo on the condition of anonymity said that these websites and RSS feeds were sometimes used to insert trending topics into the section that were not organically trending on the site.
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Changes to how it recommends new accounts to follow, and how it reveals trending topics outside of our existing networks, could help a great deal in combatting the threat of getting stuck in your own filter bubble.
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" Zuckerberg later said that Facebook "found no evidence" that the allegations reported by Gizmodo were true, and that the company is conducting a full investigation "to ensure our teams upheld the integrity of [the Trending Topics product].
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With just a few weeks left before we close out 213, Google has analyzed its trillions of searches and announced the top trending topics throughout the year across all categories, ranging from news to entertainment to beauty.
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A controversy over reports that it had "suppressed" conservative news from its Trending Topics module earlier this year led the company to purge most of its editorial employees, who helped make decisions about which stories to highlight.
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On Monday, it said that it could find no evidence of any systemic suppression in the section and that "conservative and liberal topics are approved as trending topics at virtually identical rates," according to a blog post.
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The remarks on political neutrality reflect renewed attention to bias on Facebook after recent allegations that its Trending Topics feature, which is run by a team of editors working from an algorithmically generated list of news stories.
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On "Black Twitter," a term used to describe trending topics among black users on the social media site, #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes began trending as people satirically attributed famous lines by black leaders and black musical performers to Ms. Trump.
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"They were going through how they handle the trending topics and asking us what within of it and how can we make this better," Martin said, adding that there was also discussion of Facebook's News Feed feature.
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I guess maybe they saw the frozen short as an insult or something Everyone hated it, I went to Coco premier here in Mexico and the next Monday on the office there were 2 trending topics 1.
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Conservatives have alleged Facebook bias for years, with the narrative building after reports that Facebook's content reviewers were suppressing conservative content via its "Trending Topics" feature led to an inquiry by the Senate Commerce committee in 2016.
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Instead, Facebook could have chosen to keep descriptions for major Trending Topics shown to lots of people in English, and just drop them when the algorithms suggest a niche Trend or one for users with unsupported languages.
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Facebook responded today to official queries regarding its Trending Topics feature, specifically allegations made over the last few weeks that the team responsible for it was deliberately suppressing conservative views and arbitrarily elevating stories with little oversight.
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Facebook claimed in September that it would roll out technology that would combat fake stories in its Trending topics, but clearly that has not yet come to pass – or the technology isn't up to the task at hand.
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Thune had been the most vocal politician to come out against Facebook after some of the social network's former contractors alleged that there had been instances in which conservative media outlets were suppressed in the Trending Topics section.
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First, Gizmodo said that biased human curators hired by Facebook—not just automated algorithms—were deciding what news stories showed up as Trending Topics on the company's social network, before sprucing them up with fresh headlines and descriptions.
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BOORSTIN: NOW SCHROEP YOU OVERSEE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DOES THIS CONTROVERSY MAKE YOU THINK THERE IS A PRIORITY IN CREATING A KIND OF A.I. FOR TRENDING TOPICS IN THE NEWS FEED SO YOU WOULDN'T NEED HUMAN CREATORS AT ALL?
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Remember how, after Facebook was accused of bias in its Trending Topics, Glenn Beck knocked fellow conservatives for showing up at the company with a list of demands, asking for what he described as "affirmative action for conservatives"?
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Even before media and the public began questioning Facebook's supposed "news bubble" in the aftermath of Brexit and the election, the US Senate demanded an official explanation from Zuckerberg about the platform's perceived liberal bias concerning trending topics.
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The company said an internal probe showed no evidence of political bias in the selection of news stories for Trending Topics, a feature that is separate from the main "news feed" where most Facebook users get their news.
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John Thune (R-SD), signed a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg containing questions about the nature of the company's Trending Topics section following allegations, reported first by Gizmodo yesterday, that contract workers censored stories from conservative outlets.
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And while the company has not made any data available, it seems clear that the News Feed drives exponentially more traffic to news stories than the lower-profile Trending Topics, which is all but invisible on mobile devices.
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He fired the contractors who worked as editors of the Trending Topics section and replaced them a few months later with an algorithm that greatly contributed to the fake news problem by regularly putting misinformation in user's newsfeeds.
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THUNE BRUSHES OFF FAKE NEWS ON FACEBOOK: Earlier this year, Thune was the loudest lawmaker voice when it came to concerns that curators working for Facebook's Trending Topics section were filtering out stories and sources popular with conservatives.
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Three days after Facebook said it would remove the human editors who curate the Trending topics section and replace them with a purely algorithmic system, the company trended a fake news story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.
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This week, Facebook's Trending Topics system was notably late to a huge social media protest, Elon Musk announced new solar roof panels that the company hopes will change how we consume electric power and Instagram tested shoppable tags.
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Twitter announced on Tuesday the year's biggest trending topics and most widely shared tweets in news and politics, and while the election loomed large, several of the most popular discussions were focused on matters of identity and safety.
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With an average age of 21, employees control more than 400 accounts — such as Hogwarts Logic, Medieval Reactions, Student Problems, and Love Food — and weave brands into their content in an attempt to create trending topics for clients.
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For one, the feature is buried, like many of Twitter's only more extraneous add-ons, in the search menu alongside trending topics and Moments, both of which take up the majority of the upper half of the running list.
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But by the end of comedian Michelle Wolf's set, there were no fewer than five trending topics on Twitter about the dinner, almost entirely relating to one specific joke Wolf made about White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
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But Mexican social media is a hall of mirrors, and Merlo believes that when journalists like the ones at Verificado try and debunk his fake stories or call out his artificial trending topics, they only make them trend more.
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According to CEO Andrew Torba, the impetus for building a site expressly tolerant of intolerance was "the suppression of conservative sources and stories by the incredibly biased Facebook Trending Topics team," referring to a story Gizmodo reported last May.
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"We think of it almost like Twitter trending topics," says Alan Ritter, an Ohio State professor who worked on the research and will be presenting it at the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics in June.
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Arabic-language hashtags like "We have to stand by our leader" and "28 riyals prize for the best patriotic comments" spread across the platform, receiving tens of thousands of tweets and retweets, and hitting trending topics within the country.
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The committee also wants more information about a so-called "injection tool," which curators allegedly used to pin stories in the Trending Topics list that were not in fact popular enough to have been flagged by the system's algorithms.
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And then there are those who think the combination of algorithms and editors that influence the Trending Topics list — which is often a mix of hard news, celebrity pandering and shark attack videos — are not exactly understanding the audience.
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" In a statement, Beatty said: "As a Member of Congress, it's imperative we tap into trending topics to help deliver important messages to the next generation, especially when it comes to the importance of voting and using one's voice.
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In May, the company grappled with accusations that politically biased employees were censoring some conservative stories and websites in Facebook's Trending Topics section, a part of the site that shows the most talked-about stories and issues on Facebook.
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If you've only just recently heard of ASMR thanks to the viral memes and trending topics associated with the online community, you may be surprised to learn that the first ASMR YouTube videos popped up online a decade ago.
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Then, in two well-publicized incidents, the trending topics feature surfaced a story that said that Fox News' Kelly had been fired for supporting Clinton and a second one promoting a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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The author of the Gizmodo story contacted us to say that two former contractors had made that specific charge, and that the larger issue is that any human intervention in Trending Topics could lead to charges of political bias.
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The 66-year-old talk show host and media mogul became one of Twitter's top trending topics on Tuesday night after rumors began circulating on social media that she, along with other celebrities, had been arrested for sex trafficking.
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It all began last week when a Gizmodo report featured anonymous interviews with contractors who expressed grievances about working on Facebook's "Trending Topics" section, which is a relatively small box on the upper right corner of Facebook's desktop version.
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Nevertheless, Tumblr published its annual year-in-review in December, highlighting the most popular fandoms and trending topics in categories ranging from K-pop, to Pokémon, to the best "ships" (fictionalized relationships that Tumblr users love to speculate about).
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Digital tools that reporters regularly use to find news, like Dataminr and Google Trends, can't replace the beat reporting and other traditional methods that provide stories that can become trending topics or traffic drivers on both search and social.
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The damning hashtag #RIPTwitter stayed firmly lodged at the top of the social network's list of trending topics in reaction to a report that Twitter planned to inch closer to Facebook by overhauling its signature news feed with an algorithm.
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BOORSTIN: THE OTHER BIG TOPIC MAKING HEADLINES AND ALSO GENERATING CONVERSATION HERE AT CODE IS ALL OF THIS CONTROVERSY OVER THE QUESTION OF WHETHER OR NOT THERE WAS BIAS IN THE TRENDING TOPICS THAT FACEBOOK PUTS IN PEOPLE'S NEWS FEED.
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Gizmodo's sources cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris, events in the Syrian conflict and the Black Lives Matter movement as instances where the trending topics team injected topics into the module.
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John Thune requested information on who at the company made the decisions on stories for Facebook's Trending Topics feature, what training is provided to employees, whether the company is investigating and what steps it will take to hold people accountable.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked a lot on the company's last earnings call about live video and immediacy around the news, but Facebook hasn't figured it out, as evidenced by its trending topics nightmare that doesn't seem to go away.
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The company announced earlier this year that there is no predetermined list of publications that are eligible to appear in the Trending Results page and that trending topics and publications featured will be based on algorithms that combine popularity and engagement.
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Facebook says it has "found no evidence" of manipulation The company has pushed back against Gizmodo's report, saying it does not "permit the suppression of political perspectives" and has never banned a news outlet from appearing in the Trending Topics bar.
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Basically, the Fairness Doctrine would have forced broadcasters to represent liberal and conservative viewpoints on every issue — if it was in place today, it might have required Facebook to give equal play to conservative and liberal stories in Trending Topics.
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The question is an important one, especially now, just a few weeks removed from a report early last month that Facebook, another important platform for publishers, was systematically suppressing conservative news and headlines from appearing in its trending topics section.
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Although a U.S. Senate committee is investigating whether there is liberal bias in selection of trending topics, there is little chance the government will try to regulate Facebook's practices, said Republican Senator John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
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But the guidelines, which have never before been made public, give insight into how editors guide and discover news items being shared widely across the social network, and how those editors decide what to promote inside the Trending Topics section.
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For instance, after algorithms detect early signs of popular stories on the network, editors are asked to cross-reference potential trending topics with a list of 10 major news publications, including CNN, Fox News, The Guardian and The New York Times.
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Without humans slowing down and driving up the price of the product, everyone will get to see Trending Topics that are even better tailored to your interests based on Pages you Like, your location, Trends you previously interacted with, and more.
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It also raises concerns about whether Twitter is aptly prepared for the 2020 presidential election, after 2016's race was marred by bot accounts who were successful in spreading fake news and influencing voter opinion by manipulating the platform's "trending" topics.
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The company says it has found no evidence to suggest the allegations about trending topics are true and has long maintained its political neutrality, working hard to push back against the latest controversy — with statements coming from several prominant executives.
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The company this week released some of the guidelines that govern its all-important News Feed - the place most people see postings on Facebook - and has pushed back hard against recent allegations of political bias in its "Trending Topics" module.
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On Wednesday, the professional network is rolling out a "Trending" topics feed, a new section of the app where users can find a collection of recent news stories and accompanying user posts that are personalized based on their interests and profession.
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Hungry South Koreans were clearly impressed and by midday #Pyongyang Naengmyeon was one of the top trending topics on Korean-language Twitter while the lines at restaurants specializing in the dish, like the Eulmildae in a run-down part of Seoul, grew.
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However, as if to prove the very manner in which the US and—more appropriately for the purposes of this column—social media are divided in this day and age, the subject owned trending topics on Twitter, but in wildly different ways.
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Gizmodo cited other ex-curators who also claimed that they "forced" stories into the trending topics module, which appears on users' pages on the desktop site to let them know what topics are most popular with other users, before they were actually trending.
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Here are Twitter's top 10 trending topics in 2016: #Rio2016 #Election2016 #PokemonGo #Euro2016 #Oscars #Brexit #Blacklivesmatter #Trump #RIP #GameofThrones The top global retweets came from YouTuber Rubiu5's giveaway, a cheeky Harry Styles, and from Hillary Clinton after her election concession speech.
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In case you missed Facebook's announcement in May, the Trending Topics section was redesigned with a focus on making it easier to see how other publications are covering a topic, in addition to what friends and public figures are saying about the matter.
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However, Facebook has had numerous problems with these sorts of automated systems in the past: after firing its entire Trending Topics editorial team earlier this summer, the site subsequently picked up a number of false stories, which gave false content considerable visibility.
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Those went into overdrive after allegations earlier this year that Facebook's Trending Topics module was biased against conservative news — which led to the firing of human editors and the replacement of an occasionally useful product with an information-free jumble of popular keywords.
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One former Facebook Trending Topics editor, who spoke under condition of anonymity because this person had signed a nondisclosure agreement with the company, said it was up to the editors' discretion to promote newsy topics that were not quite percolating on Facebook.
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State of the Art When allegations surfaced last month that Facebook routinely suppressed conservative points of view in its Trending Topics news section, the company worked aggressively to convince the public that it wasn't intentionally tilting to the left of the political spectrum.
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The current discussion of bias and Facebook started this month, after some former Facebook contractors claimed that the "trending topics" section on Facebook highlighted stories that were vetted by a small team of editors who had a prejudice against right-wing news sources.
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A Senate GOP chairman on Tuesday said he is looking into the allegations of political bias after a report early this week from Gizmodo quoting a former Facebook worker alleging curators routinely omitted conservative topics and reports from its popular trending topics section.
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In May, the company had to grapple with reports that some editors working on its "Trending Topics" section — a portion of the site in which Facebook displays some of the most-talked-about stories on the network — were suppressing conservative political content.
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Another QAnon supporter was arrested the next month occupying a Cemex cement factory, claiming that he had knowledge that Cemex was secretly assisting in child trafficking—a theory discussed in Facebook groups, in an attempt to push it into Twitter trending topics.
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Following the controversial firing of the editorial team who managed the Trending Topics that appear next to Facebook's News Feed, the company is now actively working on technology that will help prevent fake news stories from showing up in the Trending section.
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His videos are pegged to trending topics — whipping up nefarious plots around fidget spinners and Avril Lavigne — but they also plug into old-fashioned lines of conspiratorial thinking: the Illuminati rules humanity, the Earth is flat and the Apollo 11 mission was faked.
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But the company has also been working to minimize and correct the appearance of bias in those policies ever since it was reported that the company's employees may have suppressed stories from right-leaning publications and authors in its "Trending Topics" section.
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Keeping track of these lists is getting confusing, so here's a straightforward breakdown of how Facebook uses them to source and write its Trending Topics headlines: We've embedded both the 1K list and the RSS list at the bottom of this post.
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We will also keep looking into any questions about Trending Topics to ensure that people are matched with the stories that are predicted to be the most interesting to them, and to be sure that our methods are as neutral and effective as possible.
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At 1pm pacific May 9th, Facebook said in a statement to TechCrunch that it was against the company's curation policy to suppress or prioritize specific political views in its Trending topics, and that it has guidelines in place to preserve consistency and neutrality there.
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Zuckerberg's comments came after tech blog Gizmodo kicked off a furor on Monday over whether Facebook allowed its "trending topics" module to move organically in line with users' interests, or manipulated it by using news judgment similar to that employed by traditional media outlets.
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When Recode reached out to Twitter to ask what it is doing to combat the proliferation of bot generated tweets in light of the Macron campaign hack, a spokesperson pointed to policies the company has that prohibit the posting of automated tweets for trending topics.
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Facebook's redesigned Trending Topics section, now dubbed Trending News, is widely available on mobile for iPhone and Android users in the US, giving users a central location for all of the company's aggregation efforts after a tumultuous year of changes to how Facebook handles journalism.
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Thune, whose committee oversees tech issues, asked Facebook to provide a full accounting of how the Trending Topics feature works, the role of news curators and the steps the social network has taken in response to allegations of politically motivated manipulation of news stories.
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But when it comes to the larger problem of automated accounts on Twitter designed to spread spam and scams, inflate follower counts, and game trending topics, a new study finds that the company still isn't keeping up with the deluge of garbage and abuse.
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Here's Thune's statement in full: Private companies are fully entitled to espouse their own views, so I appreciate Facebook's efforts to address allegations of bias raised in the media and my concern about a lack of transparency in its methodology for determining trending topics.
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Exactly what Snapchat plans to do with the five-year-old startup isn't clear; Vurb markets its app as a convenient tool for searching, discovering trending topics, and carrying out tasks like making reservations and hailing Uber / Lyft without hopping between several different apps.
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"Private companies are fully entitled to espouse their own views, so I appreciate Facebook's efforts to address allegations of bias raised in the media and my concern about a lack of transparency in its methodology for determining trending topics," Senator Thune said in a statement.
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While algorithms determine the exact mix of topics displayed to each person, based on that user's past actions on Facebook, a team of people is largely responsible for the overall mix of which topics should — and more important, should not — be shown in Trending Topics.
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"Trending Topics is designed to surface popular conversations — no matter where they fall on the political spectrum — and our guidelines require the review team members to allow all points of view," Debbie Frost, Facebook's vice president for international and policy communications, said in a statement.
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As it puts its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) head-to-head against Facebook's Instant Articles, Google needs to prove it's a company that's on the side of publishers against censorship and avoid the missteps Facebook has made with Trending Topics and deleting newsworthy content.
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An automated Facebook feature called Trending Topics, introduced in 2014, turned out to mainly identify junk as trends, and so "news curators," who tended to be recent college graduates, were given a new, manual mandate, "massage the algorithm," which meant deciding, themselves, which stories mattered.
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There is a trending topics section so you can get up to speed on current issues, and a weekly quiz that tests critical thinking and understanding of the current political debate (note that you have to be very much on top of the news).
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Described as "a stinky, sit-down comedy talk show satire" on the YouTube profile page, the daily broadcast involved the duo commenting on a grab-bag of trending topics—from new Hot Chip music to Russian prank masturbation videos—with their own party stories sprinkled in.
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The move is the latest attempt by Facebook to control political criticism after a report from Gizmodo, the technology news site, which cited two former Facebook news curators as saying some conservative news was not promoted on Trending Topics, depending on the individual biases of staff members.
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"Even if you want to have computers do everything, for technical reasons, resource limitations and product positioning, you may want humans to oversee the algorithms," Jonathan Koren, a former Facebook employee who worked on algorithmic ranking for Trending Topics, wrote in a LinkedIn post this week.
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On Tuesday, Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, sent a letter of inquiry to Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, asking the company to further explain its editorial guidelines and to disclose whether there was "any level of subjectivity associated with" the Trending Topics section.
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For the last two years, Facebook has been dealing with accusations that its News Feed "curators" suppressed conservative news, all because the curators were populating the platform's trending topics section with credible outlets like The New York Times instead of partisan shops like The Daily Caller.
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His appointment as editor prompted industry speculation that he was going to go "full Cosmo," chasing Instagram-friendly content and trending topics on Twitter just like Cosmopolitan, Esquire's sister publication at Hearst that has lately been pursuing data as hotly as it long proselytized multiple orgasms.
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To escape allegations of bias, Facebook fired the team of journalists who vetted and wrote Trending Topics blurbs and turned the feature over to an algorithm, which quickly began promoting fake stories from sites designed to churn out incendiary election stories and convert them into quick cash.
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In addition to the extra red tape, the process of finding and selecting Trending Topics items is getting a makeover: If you were curious about the exact process by which a story goes from hashtag or local news to Trending Topic, read the letter to Sen.
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He says that Twitter is starting with non-political topics in order to fully understand how users react to the feature and study how its algorithms work at scale, which is perhaps a nod to concerns that trending topics can potentially have outsized impacts on elections.
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Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and CTO Mike Shroepfer talked with Recode's Kara Swisher at the 2016 Code Conference about the two controversies recently faced by the social media giant: Board member Peter Thiel's vendetta against Gawker Media and allegations that Facebook's trending topics were chosen with a liberal bias.
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And, given that all this is taking place less than a week after Twitter execs took Facebook to task for referring to Twitter as "social media" in its list of trending topics following Kanye West's epic tweetstorm, it seems safe to say Facebook's Friends Day experiment was a success.
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And Wednesday's change appears to be a doubling down on that philosophy, and an opportunity for Facebook to clearly state its "News Feed values" in the wake of the recent controversy over claims of muting some conservative voices over liberal ones on how Facebook curates its Trending Topics.
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" Facebook has previously been accused of liberal bias by demoting conservative views in its Trending Topics feature — which likely explains why it's so keen to specify that systems it's built to try to suppress the spread of certain types of "inauthentic" content do not assess "the content itself.
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Facebook and Twitter have long been targeted by conservatives for perceived liberal bias regarding how they moderate their platforms, with Facebook having come under fire two years ago for alleged censoring of right-wing news sources in its Trending Topics feature, which has since been removed from the site.
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If an editorial team is deliberating over trending topics—just like a newspaper staff would talk about front-page news—Facebook risks losing its image as a non-partisan player in the media industry, a neutral pipeline for distributing content, rather than a selective and inherently flawed curator.
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Presumably liberal hoaxes and inaccurate liberal news are also bumped from trending topics (would Facebook let a celebrity's anti-vaccine story linger there for long?)—yet among the presumably liberal ranks of Facebook workers, this is probably seen not as suppression, but as obligatory empiricism and social responsibility.
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Last May, allegations were made that Facebook had suppressed conservative views from its "trending topics;" while Facebook claimed that its internal investigation found no evidence of systematic suppression, the company also announced that it would modify the process of trending topic selection to minimize the potential for abuse.
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"a foundation for the design of transparency reports that accompany system decisions" The research comes after a number of high-profile accusations of algorithmic bias, most notably a Gizmodo report in which a former Facebook employee accused the company of suppressing conservative news in the Trending Topics box.
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Facebook let a fake news story about Megyn Kelly sit in Trending Topics for hours Yesterday, a more serious error occurred: a fake news story about Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly's supposed secret affinity for Hillary Clinton blew up on Facebook, landing it on top of the Trending list.
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Republican lawmakers frequently accuse the company of censoring conservatives, and even though there's little evidence to support that claim, Facebook has taken great pains to placate them, from getting rid of its Trending Topics team in 2016 to commissioning a report on its anti-conservative bias last year.
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Both firms are also trying to navigate the ever-complicated news business, with Apple announcing Monday that it's bringing its Apple News product to Macbooks and Facebook announcing last week that it's ending its Trending Topics news feature, in an effort to reportedly replace it with curated news shows.
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Macy's slump drags department stores closer to the graveZuckerberg probes claims Facebook cut trending topics For things like A&W Root Beer, on the creamier, sweeter and light side of root beer, "it's going to have things like vanilla extract to tone it down, to tone down the harshness," he said.
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An hour later, Twitter India removed the hashtag from its list of trending topics (Twitter's rules say the social network "may prevent certain content from trending," including content that incites "hate on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or disease").
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After allegations surfaced that former Facebook contractors suppressed conservative trending topics, the company launched an investigation, promised transparency, and then reached out to several conservative thought leaders and personalities, including myself, to sit down and address these and other concerns with founder Mark Zuckerberg and top members of his executive team.
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The more likely explanation for its lax moderation of far-right pages is that Facebook leadership is terrified of being seen as biased against conservatives, following the 2016 episode in which members of the company's in-house news team said they kept conservative viewpoints out of Facebook's Trending Topics list.
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An examination of Trending Topics, based on interviews with current and former Facebook employees and a demonstration of the curator tools, found that Facebook's employees were not directed to squelch conservative news on the site, nor would that be easily accomplished by a staff member who wished to do so.
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These two competing understandings have collided in the last few weeks, after it was revealed that Facebook's list of "trending topics" is curated by a group of toiling journalists, not just an impersonal algorithm, and after a former curator alleged that decisions about which stories "trend" are biased against conservative perspectives.
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Twitter has not yet responded to Motherboard's request for comment, but has frequently rejected charges of playing favorites with trending topics, going so far as to write a detailed blog post in December 2010 explaining why a series of WikiLeaks-related hashtags didn't trend following the release of several US diplomatic cables ("cablegate").
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The decision (represented by hashtag #Toblerone) was second place in terms of the most talked about trends on Twitter Tuesday within the U.K. It was earlier also only second to the historic presidential elections happening in the U.S. Worldwide and it's still third in the most trending topics on the social media site.
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CEO Cheung (Chow serves as PressLogic's CTO) told TechCrunch that MediaLens "creates a pipeline from data sourcing to content suggestion to optimization" and has an edge against its competitors because it is able to make more granular suggestions about what content is likely to be popular among specific groups based on trending topics.
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If it wasn't Apple's ad blocking acceptance, it was Facebook's Instant Articles, Facebook stressing friends over news, or Facebook shutting outlets out of its trending topics (Facebook is a bit of a preoccupation.) Vice Media head Shane Smith has warned of an impending "media bloodbath" every few months for the past year.
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"These improvements and safeguards are designed not only to ensure that Facebook remains a platform that is open and welcoming to all groups and individuals, but also to restore any loss of trust in the Trending Topics feature," Colin Stretch, Facebook general counsel, said in a statement posted to the company's site.
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Related | Frank Bruni recently noted how Facebook's supposed interference with trending topics is nothing compared to our own filters: "When it comes to elevating one perspective above all others and herding people into culturally and ideologically inflexible tribes, nothing that Facebook does to us comes close to what we do to ourselves."
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"If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook's assertion that it maintains a 'platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum' misleads the public," Thune wrote to Zuckerberg.
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In an emotional 17-minute YouTube video that quickly shot to the top of trending topics on social media, Star said that he was splitting up with his "soulmate" and had been fielding false rumors that his mother had died, along with family members trying to sell the breakup story to the media.
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The guidelines lay out in great detail how an employee on the trending team should perform her job, describing how to turn trending topics on Facebook into properly formatted, grammatically correct headlines for the trending widget, which sits in the top right corner of the feeds of the company's 1.59 billion monthly active users.
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LOS ANGELES — It kicked off early in the morning, quickly climbed to the top of U.S. trending topics and had serious legs: The hashtag #fav7films dominated Twitter on Monday as users in the tens of thousands — from regular Janes and Joes to the top film critics — listed their seven favorite movies of all time.
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Call it 'going native' advertising; faux tweets intended to pass off lies as truth, inflated and amplified by bot armies (fake accounts) operating in plain sight (often gaming Twitter's trending topics) as a parallel 'unofficial' advertising infrastructure whose mission is to generate attention-grabbing pantomimes of public opinion to try and sway the real thing.
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While Twitter tries to keep a lid on porn bots hijacking trending topics to promote smutty spam (they took down a botnet of almost 90,000 fake accounts in July) and takes a hard line on child and revenge porn, it still allows most porn-y content to flow freely, albeit behind a warning wall.
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Flash forward to this week, when John Thune, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, launched an inquiry into Facebook's "trending topics" after an anonymous, conservative former Facebook worker told Gawker Media that the social media giant empowered reviewers to suppress conservative news and blacklist conservative news sources on the basis of naked political bias.
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In the past few months, Facebook has faced criticism for giving too much prominence to fake news; for censoring as offensive an iconic Vietnam War photograph of a naked girl fleeing a bombing attack; and for allegations that members of its "trending topics" team, which is now disbanded, penalized news of interest to conservatives.
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Of course, Facebook isn't completely getting rid of news — though we don't know exactly how Facebook's planned changes will play out, it seems reasonable to assume that you'll still see news in the Trending topics sidebar, in updates from any news outlets you follow on your "Pages" feed, and when you visit their Facebook pages directly.
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Tagging terrorist content such as al-Baghdadi's final video address, and other videos highlighting the "blessed mujhadeen of the State," the accounts hashtagged their content with the trending topics of the day across the Middle East and North Africa, including Saudi football clubs, a luxury rental car company in Dubai, and even a hashtag for finding a Sudanese wife.
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With millions of people on the move for what's traditionally seen as a time of fresh opportunities, the travel season is one of top trending topics on Weibo; posts tagged #2016chunyun, meaning "Spring Festival travel season," feature photos of cramped transport hubs and dish out tips on surviving the journey by avoiding ticketing scams and alleviating motion sickness.
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In an era in which the public seems to be drowning in news — from Facebook's "trending" topics sidebar to Apple's news app — and the news cycle is spinning faster and faster, nearly seven in 10 Americans feel "overwhelmed by the amount of news there is," according to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center.
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A study led by Philip N. Howard, a specialist in Internet studies at Oxford University, found that, during the second debate of the general election, automated Twitter accounts, known as "bots," generated four tweets in favor of Trump for every one in favor of Clinton, driving Trump's messages to the top of trending topics, which mold media priorities.
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"If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as the result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook's assertion that it maintains a 'platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum' misleads the public," Thune said to Zuckerberg in the letter.
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According to Gizmodo's source (who declined to be named, so it's hard to verify his claims), Facebook's trending topics team tended to be dismissive of stories that came from right-leaning news outlets such as Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax — waiting instead until more mainstream news organizations like the New York Times or the BBC covered them.
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Maybe later we will go into the details of the multiple products and how each one MAY be impacted by an unconscious bias — and how Trending topics in particular MAY be vulnerable to manipulation — but the reason I went to Facebook was not to find out whether there was a small issue, but to see whether there was a real issue.
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"If Facebook presents its Trending Topics section as a result of a neutral, objective algorithm, but it is in fact subjective and filtered to support or suppress particular political viewpoints, Facebook's assertion that it maintains 'a platform for people and perspectives from across the political spectrum' misleads the public," wrote Thune, who chairs the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.
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Donald TrumpDonald John TrumpPossible GOP challenger says Trump doesn't doesn't deserve reelection, but would vote for him over Democrat O'Rourke: Trump driving global, U.S. economy into recession Manchin: Trump has 'golden opportunity' on gun reforms MORE said Wednesday he hasn't personally seen evidence of Facebook not including conservative news among its trending topics but said "it's terrible" if the allegations are true.
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In a 2012 paper about race relations on Twitter, Dr. André Brock, a University of Michigan communications professor, wrote about how the surfacing of popular hashtags and trending topics "brought the activities of tech-literate blacks to mainstream attention," creating a space where the expressions of black identity are subject to "intense monitoring" by white people — a kind of accelerator for cultural appropriation.
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PAI DODGES ON FACEBOOK: Senior Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai demurred when asked whether Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John ThuneJohn Randolph ThuneSchumer blasts 'red flag' gun legislation as 'ineffective cop out' Lawmakers jump-start talks on privacy bill Trump border fight throws curveball into shutdown prospects MORE was right to pursue Facebook for allegations that it had downplayed conservative content in its trending topics section.
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Other trending topics tweeted by bot accounts over the past week include #MAGA, referring to President TrumpDonald John TrumpFacebook releases audit on conservative bias claims Harry Reid: 'Decriminalizing border crossings is not something that should be at the top of the list' Recessions happen when presidents overlook key problems MORE's "Make America Great Again" slogan, along with #Trump2202 and #QAnon, a reference to a right-wing conspiracy group.
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With viral videos, trending topics and plenty of GIFs, the internet has crowned some of the early fan favorites as the American speedskater Maame Biney, the Jamaican women's bobsled team and, adding to momentum they built up long before the opening ceremony Friday, the Nigerian women's bobsled team (not to mention the shirtless Tongan competing improbably as a cross-country skier after flaming out in taekwondo at the 1503 Summer Olympics).
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Beyond web search, Google Go includes other discovery features, as well — like the ability to tap through trending topics, voice search, image and GIF search, an easy way to switch between languages, and the ability to have web pages read aloud, powered by AI. At Google's I/O developer conference this spring, the company announced it was also bringing Lens to Google Go. Lens allows users to point their smartphone camera at real-world objects in order to bring up relevant information.
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Guidance for the editors of the trending topics feature, changed almost a year ago, said a topic could not be added to the list "if one of the first 12 posts (the 'feed') associated with that topic did not include a post from a news organization, a primary source, or a verified profile or page," according to a letter from Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch to Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John ThuneJohn Randolph ThuneSchumer blasts 'red flag' gun legislation as 'ineffective cop out' Lawmakers jump-start talks on privacy bill Trump border fight throws curveball into shutdown prospects MORE (R-S.D.).
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Incorporating Feedback About Ads – Using surveys about why people hide ads, fewer similar ads to ads someone hid because it wasn't relevant to them, fewer ads shown to anyone that people hide because they were offensive, more heavily weighting the hides by people who infrequently hide ads More Timely Stories – More stories that reference current Trending Topics, more stories shown soon after they're posted if people Like them soon after they're posted but Like them less later More Control Over What You See – When you hide someone's story, you can select to see less from that person in the future without completely unfollowing them Reducing Promotional Page Posts – Fewer posts that solely push people to buy a product, install an app, enter a sweepstakes, or that reuse the exact same content from ads.
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