The decision to nix Trending’s human editors has proven controversial in mere days—but Facebook has long put too much faith in automation.
The decision to nix Trending’s human editors has proven controversial in mere days—but Facebook has long put too much faith in automation.
When Facebook unceremoniously fired the team of human editors responsible for curating its Trending section, surely it didn’t expect to be betrayed by its algorithm so quickly. Facebook laid off all the Trending curators on Friday, under the guise of wanting to reduce bias and “make the product more automated.” The Trending team is being repopulated with engineers, who will oversee the algorithms charged with sussing out Trending content.
