Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news feed, documents show

Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by jonathankoren on Thursday May 12, 2016 @11:12PM (#11688398)

It works exactly as FB has publicly stated. As set of topics are algorithmically detected from a variety of sources. Let's say this set has "many many" things in it. Many of which are of low quality. The best comparison I can give you is Twitter trends. Humans approve some of these detected topics to appear in the trending module. Let's just say there are now "many" topics. Yes, curators have the ability to insert a topic in to the trending list, and yes they have ability to make something appear in everyone's trending module, but it's not really used. It's mostly there so that you don't have to wait minutes for trending to detect that aliens have landed on the Washington Mall, or that nuclear war has broken out. In fact, the "everyone must see this now!" has never been used. This candidate set of approved topics is then algorithmically ranked for each person. Using criteria that they said.

If you really care, it uses a GBDT and the newly released Facebook Flow.

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Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by jmiserez on Friday May 13, 2016 @04:00AM (#11689214)

Wow, that is horrible. And equally horrible is the fact that you don't seem to find this problematic at all. If the features were/are regularly used is not really relevant: "algorithmically selected" implies a certain non-bias in the process, but if this is not how it really works then one should be much much more skeptical about the validity of any "trending" topics.

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Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by emn13 on Friday May 13, 2016 @06:09AM (#11689527)

It's a common misconception that "algorithmically selected" implies a certain non-bias. Perhaps this myth stems from examples used to explain simple algorithms (e.g. drawing straws, or pulling names from a hat).

Complex algorithms certainly do exhibit bias, and not only that - it's intentional. The whole point of a "trending" topic is to discriminate (i.e. inject bias) trendy topics from less trendy topics.

So you're talking about only adding the bias you want it to add - but I hope you can imagine that's an impossible cause to get 100% correct. There's no rigorous definition of trending; nor is there a rigorous definition of the topics to be selected from, nor are lots of other matters here rigorously defined. There's no way you're going to do better than some fuzzy algorithms trained on real data. Critically, that tends to mean real data generated by... biased humans.

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Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by _Understated_ on Friday May 13, 2016 @07:37AM (#11689794)

I would have thought that the algorithm would be entirely agnostic and based on incoming data only without humans to distort it, e.g. I share details with a dozen friends about aliens landing in Central Park, they then share it on and on. Facebooks algorithm will spot this and also others who did the same and then say "Hey, looks like there is a trend growing about aliens in Central Park" and from there would act upon it based on that data only, e.g. this topic was talked about 5 million times in the last minute and therefore bump it up the list to its corresponding position based on other "trending" topics.

Having humans involved will distort that process, thus meaning true trending does not exist. Well, on Facebook at least.

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Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by jler on Friday May 13, 2016 @03:36AM (#11689139)

Right. Like the time it was used when it was decided everyone in India got the post about supporting Facebook's Internet.org to save humanity or whatever.

Facebook's employees repulse me.

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Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by fapjacks on Friday May 13, 2016 @03:54AM (#11689197)

I have a question, mostly unrelated, so I apologize ahead of time. Do actual humans review pictures that are reported? I've been reporting a picture for a few months and get repeatedly "This picture does not violate our community guidelines". It's a picture of the bloody, naked, mutilated corpse of a murder victim with a crucifix shoved down her throat. I have reported it fifteen or twenty times over the last six months with the same answer, that the picture doesn't violate Facebook's community guidelines. What's that about?

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Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by scholia on Friday May 13, 2016 @06:47AM (#11689617)

That sounds like the sort of question you should ask Buzzfeed, HuffPo or a similar website. Like Google and other companies, Facebook is normally very quick to respond to bad publicity.

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Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by Angostura on Friday May 13, 2016 @08:24AM (#11689963)

I really don;t see anything horrible about a mixture of human curation and algorithmic work at all. It's the way that Digg works, for example.

What make it 'horrible' in your view? An implicit suggestion that 'trending' is mathematically deduced a la Reddit's 'Hot'?

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Re:Facebook relies on editors' judgment for trending news fe... by TrevorJ on Friday May 13, 2016 @01:42PM (#11691894)

There's nothing wrong with it, the problem is calling it 'trending'. Trending implies that these are the things that the users on facebook are talking about. If the list is, in fact curated by facebook employees then that's fine but it shouldn't be passed off as trending.

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