(Amy Cavenaile/The Washington Post; iStock)Facebook just greatly diminished the role that human beings will play in the platform’s Trending topics bar, announcing on Friday that actual people will no longer write topic descriptions for the site. Humans will serve a janitorial role in the process, while the algorithms take more control. According to the guidelines for the Trending reviewers, they’re required to accept “all” algorithmically surfaced topics, unless it’s not a “real-world event,” or if it’s a duplicate of an already trending topic. Although not named specifically, many of Facebook’s changes to Trending rolled out in the wake of two Gizmodo reports detailing the control humans had in the process. [Facebook’s ‘sweeping’ reforms to trending topics won’t actually change much]But overall, the reporting raised serious questions about the Trending process, particularly given Facebook’s enormous role in determining what stories the public sees and reads.

Source: Washington Post August 26, 2016 21:11 UTC