Here’s the thing about Facebook’s bar of “trending” topics: It’s basically news aggregation, representing itself as a data point. It looks like a neutral platform, but humans play a role in what you see and don’t see.
Facebook’s own description of its trending bar certainly doesn’t dissuade readers from thinking that the trending process is automated. Facebook says on its site that “Trending shows you topics that have recently become popular on Facebook” and that the topics any given user sees “are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you’ve liked and your location.” The description certainly doesn’t say anything about the role of curators in this process. In August, Re/code wrote a whole piece on how Facebook’s trends work. That piece described the process as an algorithmic one.
So it’s easy to understand why, on one side, the popular assumption is that the trending list primarily represents the results of an algorithm, with minimal human involvement. On the other side, it’s more complicated: The algorithm guides what ends up on the bar, but it takes human beings to make sense of what the algorithm is saying.
Given what we know about how information – particularly bad information – can circulate among Facebook’s users, it shouldn’t be that surprising that the “trending” topics Facebook shows you every day aren’t the result of a “pure” algorithm.
Tarleton Gillespie examined this disconnect in response to Gizmodo’s report, noting:
“In many ways, a trending algorithm can be an enormous liability, if allowed to be: it could generate a list of dreadful or depressing topics; it could become a playground for trolls who want to fill it with nonsense and profanity; it could reveal how little people use Facebook to talk about matters of public importance; it could reveal how depressingly little people care about matters of public importance; and it could help amplify a story critical of Facebook itself.”
Gizmodo’s report was so explosive that it ended up trending on Facebook. But no matter how this shakes out, it’s becoming harder to see a bar of “trends” on a site like Facebook without thinking about how they got there in the first place.
