
 
 (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. The small change comes months after the company faced an unusually high level of scrutiny for alleged political bias in its Trending feature. 
 
 Humans will serve a janitorial role in the process, while the algorithms take more control. The people who work on Trending will now be responsible for “confirming that a topic is tied to a current event in the real world,” the company said in a blog post. For example, the company explained that “#lunch” wouldn’t end up trending, even though a bunch of people talk about it on Facebook every day (at, duh, lunch time). 
 
 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. 
 
 “This is something we always hoped to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year,” the company said. 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. One former employee accused the company of suppressing stories that appealed to conservatives, a specific charge that Facebook — along with other former employees of the Trending team — denied. 
 
 [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. It pulled back the curtain a bit on the fantasy that a platform like Facebook is inherently neutral. 
 
 In May, Facebook announced that humans would no longer rely on other news outlets to vet the events surfaced by the algorithm and removed the power to “accelerate” newsy stories of great importance onto the Trending list if they weren’t yet trending on the social network. As the Intersect pointed out at the time, the changes were meant to ease concerns about the Trending team’s alleged bias, but didn’t really change the fact that the algorithm was already the hardest worker by far in the Trending process. 
 
 In any case, the image on the left is what Trending used to look like. On the right is what it’s become with the changes: 
 
 The stories still appear on the list due to a combination of volume and momentum. Trending stories not only have a lot of mentions — they have a spiking number of them. Something else that hasn’t changed? Facebook still uses the data it collects on users to “personalize” the process. Those remain the most influential factors in determining what it is that users see in that trending bar, and for both, we can thank the algorithm. 
 
 The thing is, Facebook’s changes to the human role in this process might be the best way for it to address the PR nightmare that followed the Gizmodo reporting, but it doesn’t remove the most influential source of human biases in the whole process. Facebook’s algorithms were, after all, written by humans. And they reflect the biases and errors that any human-created thing contains. 
 
 Read more: ||||| It has been more than three months since Gizmodo first published a story claiming Facebook’s human editors were suppressing conservative news content on the site’s Trending Topics section. Facebook vehemently denied the report, but has been dealing with the story’s aftermath ever since. 
 
 On Friday, Facebook announced another small but notable change to Trending Topics: Human editors will no longer write the short story descriptions that accompany a trending topic on the site. Instead, Facebook is going to use algorithms to “pull excerpts directly from stories.” 
 
 It is not, however, cutting out humans entirely. In fact, Facebook employees will still select which stories ultimately make it into the trending section. An algorithm will surface popular stories, but Facebook editors will weed out the inappropriate or fake ones. “There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality,” the company’s blog reads. 
 
 Facebook says automating story descriptions will help it expand Trending Topics to more countries and languages. But that wasn’t the catalyst here. “This is something we always planned to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year,” the post reads. 
 
 That’s as close as you’ll get to Facebook attributing this change to Gizmodo’s report. 
 
 At the heart of all this drama is the fact that consumer companies like Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat are all walking a fine line between being a neutral platform to host news, and a subjective media company that creates it. 
 
 Facebook and Twitter, for example, both use algorithms to surface some user posts, but suppress others. Those algorithms are human-generated, and thus inherently biased. Snapchat and Twitter are using human editors to create event recaps, including summaries of breaking news events. 
 
 So humans impact what you do and do not see on these services, and the challenge, especially for Facebook, is making it clear how involved these humans actually are. Hence Friday’s update. ||||| Today, we’re making some changes to the Trending feature on Facebook that will make the product more automated and will no longer require people to write descriptions for trending topics. 
 
 We added Trending to Facebook in 2014, and similar to Search, Trending was designed to help people discover interesting and relevant conversations happening on Facebook, about breaking news and events from around the world. 
 
 Our goal is to enable Trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied solely on summarizing topics by hand. A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time. This is something we always hoped to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year. 
 
 Here’s how these changes will work: 
 
 Instead of seeing a story description in Trending, you’ll now see a simplified topic — for example, #PhelpsFace or NASA — as well as the number of people talking about that particular topic on Facebook. This is based on the number of original posts that mention the topic and shares of posts about the topic. 
 
 To see more about what people are saying about a topic, you can hover over it or click on it. A search results page will include the news sources that are covering it, posts discussing it and an automatically selected original news story with an excerpt pulled directly from the top article itself. As before, articles and posts that appear in search results are surfaced algorithmically, based on a high volume of mentions and a sharp increase in mentions over a short period of time. 
 
 Like much of the content you see across Facebook, the list of topics you see is still personalized based on a number of factors, including Pages you’ve liked, your location (for example home state sports news), the previous trending topics with which you’ve interacted, and what is trending across Facebook overall. 
 
 There are still people involved in this process to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality — for example, confirming that a topic is tied to a current news event in the real world. The topic #lunch is talked about during lunchtime every day around the world, but will not be a trending topic. These changes mean that we no longer need to do things like write topic descriptions and short story summaries since we’re relying on an algorithm to pull excerpts directly from news stories. Our team will still strictly follow our guidelines, which have been updated to reflect these changes. 
 
 Earlier this year, we shared more information about Trending in response to questions about alleged political bias in the product. We looked into these claims and found no evidence of systematic bias. Still, making these changes to the product allows our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics. Facebook is a platform for all ideas, and we’re committed to maintaining Trending as a way for people to access a breadth of ideas and commentary about a variety of topics. 
 
 We’ll continue to listen to feedback from our community and make additional changes needed to provide a valuable Trending experience for the people who use Facebook every day. ||||| Facebook will no longer employ humans to write descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy over allegations of political bias in May. Topics appearing in the Trending section will now appear solely as a short phrase or single word, with an indication of the number of people discussing it on the social network. 
 
 Quartz confirmed from multiple sources that Facebook has laid off the entire editorial staff on the Trending team—15-18 workers contracted through a third party. The Trending team will now be staffed entirely by engineers, who will work to check that topics and articles surfaced by the algorithms are newsworthy. 
 
 Facebook maintains that trending items have always been selected by algorithms; the former editorial staff was only responsible for writing the story descriptions seen in the Trending section, according to the company. This was disputed by former contractors hired by the tech giant who told Gizmodo in May that they were instructed to manually add some stories by hand. Stories on conservative topics were routinely excluded from the Trending list even though they were popular among Facebook users, Gizmodo reported. 
 
 Facebook investigated the claims and said it found “no evidence of systematic bias,” but that hasn’t stopped the company from making changes to the feature. 
 
 A new group of humans will still be involved with Trending, although they’ll be asked to focus on correcting the algorithm’s mistakes, like preventing mundane or repetitive stories from appearing as news, according to a Facebook blog post. The retooled Trending feature will now automatically pull excerpts from news articles, a feature that may force Facebook to compensate news publishers in the European Union in the future, under proposed new rules from the European commission. 
 
 According to sources, the Trending team’s editorial staff were alerted at 4pm that they were being fired—as the news of Facebook’s switch to algorithms first broke—and were asked to leave the building by 5pm. The contractors (all of whom were at the company less than 1.5 years) were given severance equal to pay through September 1, plus two weeks, sources say. 
 
 However, removing human writers from Trending doesn’t necessarily eliminate bias. Human bias can be embedded into algorithms, and extremely difficult to strip out. That’s one of the conclusions from a study (pdf) of a popular algorithm used for processing language from Princeton University and the University of Bath released as a draft yesterday (Aug. 25). It’s currently under review for publication in a journal. 
 
 “Language itself contains recoverable and accurate imprints of our historic biases,” the authors write. “Whether these are morally neutral as towards insects or flowers, problematic as towards race or gender, or even simply veridical, reflecting the status quo for the distribution of gender with respect to careers or first names.” 
 
 Facebook’s increased reliance on automation reflects the company’s growing faith in machine intelligence. But even machines may fail to overcome some the most fundamental problems that humans face, like operating fairly in the face of embedded bias. 
 
 As Gizmodo reported in May, Facebook’s primary reason for hiring human curators appeared to be to train their algorithms in what was newsworthy—and so it’s very likely their human biases were recorded and potentially amplified by the AI.
– Facebook had bad news for its news team on Friday: Sources tell Quartz that all 15-18 editorial staff on the Trending team were told at 4pm that they were being laid off and had to be out of the building by 5pm. The sources say the workers were given severance pay equivalent to their wages through to mid-September. The workers are out of a job because Facebook, apparently stung by controversies over alleged anti-conservative bias, has decided to drastically reduce the role that humans playing in choosing trending news stories to display to the site's users, the Washington Post reports. From now on, the stories in the trending section will be chosen by algorithm and viewers will see only the topic name and the number of people talking about it, not a written description. "A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time," Facebook explains in a blog post. The only humans involved in the Trending section will be engineers, who will check for inappropriate, fake, or non-newsworthy stories, Recode reports. (In an earlier attempt to get rid of bias, Facebook stopped letting news outlets nominate topics as trending.)