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Trending Topics That Might Not Be

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 2 minutes

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“The trending news section is run by people in their 20s and early 30s, most of whom graduated from Ivy League and private East Coast schools like Columbia University and NYU. They’ve previously worked at outlets like the New York Daily News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and the Guardian. Some former curators have left Facebook for jobs at organizations including the New Yorker, Mashable, and Sky Sports.
According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. “We choose what’s trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.””

Please remember this when you decide to use Facebook, or any social media platform, for your news reading. No one knows for sure how they decide something is “trending”, and there is nothing preventing them from drawing your attention to things they want you to know, while not promoting things they would prefer you not know.

Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journalists? Here’s What Happened When It Hired Some.

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