The Saga of Facebook Trending Topics never seems to end—and it drives us nuts.
First, Gizmodo said that biased human curators hired by Facebook—not just automated algorithms—were deciding what news stories showed up as Trending Topics on the company’s social network, before sprucing them up with fresh headlines and descriptions. Then a US Senator demanded an explanation from Facebook because Gizmodo said those biased humans were suppressing conservative stories. So, eventually, Facebook jettisoned the human curators so that Trending Topics would be “more automated.” Then people complained that the more algorithmically driven system chose a fake story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly as a Trending Topic.
Don’t get us wrong. The Facebook Trending Topics deserve scrutiny. They’re a prominent source of news on a social network that serves over 1.7 billion people. But one important issue was lost among all the weird twists and turns—and the weird way the tech press covered those twists and turns. What everyone seems incapable of realizing is that everything on the Internet is run by a mix of automation and humanity. That’s just how things work. And here’s the key problem: prior to Gizmodo’s piece, Facebook seemed to imply that Trending Topics was just a transparent looking glass into what was most popular on the social network.
Yes, everything on the Internet is a mix of the human and inhuman. Automated algorithms play a very big role in some services, like, say, the Google Search Engine. But humans play a role in these services too. Humans whitelist and blacklist sites on the Google Search Engine. They make what you might think of as manual decisions, in part because today’s algorithms are so flawed. What’s more—and this is just stating what should be obvious—humans write the algorithms. That’s not insignificant. What it means is that algorithms carry human biases. They carry the biases of the people who write them and the companies those people work for. Algorithms drive the Google Search Engine, but the European Union is still investigating whether Google—meaning: the humans at Google—instilled this search engine with a bias in favor of other Google services and against competing services.
“We have to let go of the idea that there are no humans,” says Tarleton Gillespie, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research who focuses on the impact of social media on public discourse. That’s worth remembering when you think about the Facebook Trending Topics. Heck, it’s worth repeating over and over and over again.
Facebook’s ‘Crappy’ Algorithm
Jonathan Koren worked on the technology behind the Facebook Trending Topics. The bottom line, says the former Facebook engineer, is that the algorithm is “crappy.” As he puts it, this automated system “finds ‘lunch’ every day at noon.” That’s not the indictment you may think it is. The truth is that so many of today’s computer algorithms are crappy—though companies and coders are always working to improve them. And because they’re crappy, they need help from humans.
That’s why Facebook hired those news curators. “Identifying true news versus satire and outright fabrication is hard—something computers don’t do well,” Koren says. “If you want to ship a product today, you hire some curators and the problem goes away. Otherwise, you fund a research project that may or may not meet human equivalence, and you don’t have a product until it does.” This is a natural thing for Facebook or any other Internet company to do. For years, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks used humans to remove or flag lewd and horrific content on their platforms.