Last Friday, Facebook abruptly fired human editors that worked on their "trending news" section and replaced them with an algorithm, a move which didn't work out so well as the algorithm immediately began posting fake news.
This morning, Trending promoted this as its top story related to the trending topic "Megyn Kelly." The story was up for several hours, and is completely false.
Given the results, it seems safe to suggest that their news algorithm isn't exactly ready for prime-time and that a human touch is still needed to weed out the garbage.
Instead of paying humans to "write topic descriptions and short story summaries," the company said "we’re relying on an algorithm to pull excerpts directly from news stories." Which is why millions of Facebook readers this morning saw the "news" that Megyn Kelly is a traitor who has been fired.
What their algorithm actually caught and posted as "breaking news" was really nothing more than a rant from a disgruntled anti-Kelly blogger - and apparently avid Trump supporter - whose site is misguidedly named "Conservative 101". Obviously, if the blogger was actually conservative, he/she would recognize that The Donald isn't.
