The controversy? Facebook-hired editors were curating the feed, picking and choosing what to display. People didn’t like the idea of someone else picking news for them, and Facebook had made it seem as though the process was algorithmic. The news blew over, and now Facebook has a reversal: Now the Facebook Trending section actually is being run by an algorithm. For realsies this time.
The Announcement
Both acknowledging the controversy and explaining that the reasons are for scalability, the announcement is a great example of corporate tactic:
What It Means
Facebook will still rely on the human touch: But the descriptions of the trends will be removed. Now Twitter’s trending hashtags are basically the same as Facebook Trending. As Anil Dash put it on Twitter, “More accurate to say Facebook simply shifted headline writing from editors to software coders.”
