Facebook’s Trending Topics feature hits another snag over fake news story

After reducing the role of editors when it comes to curating Trending Topics, Facebook finds itself in another controversy over the feature. An erroneous story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly “backing Hillary” (referring to US Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) gets promoted in the section. Fox News calls the incident “an egregious mistake.”

The story it seems was able to pass through the review team even though Facebook has said its team is working “to ensure that the topics that appear in Trending remain high-quality.” There were enough stories written over it that it got approved. But it was later found there were problems with accuracy about the supposed story. If there’s one lesson here, it reminds us to not believe everything you see online. And Facebook still has a lot of work to do when it comes to verifying stories before these get promoted.

 Source: CNET