BENGALURU: Facebook is advancing towards automation of the "trending" stories feature. This shift will minimize human input to thwart personal bias from determining the stories that get highlighted.

A Facebook blog post states that the social media company will greatly swear on an algorithm to get the feature running. This will enable enlisting of news and events which are hot topics instead of manual input wherein people enter the descriptions. Earlier this year, this feature instigated controversy, where critics alleged Facebook’s new curators on purposefully skipping stories from politically conservative   outlets. Facebook explains that by depending largely on software will let the feature encompass a broader scale and at the same time reduce the risk of any personal bias controlling the list of trending topics.

"We looked into these claims and found no evidence of systematic bias," Facebook restated in its blog post Friday, adding that "making these changes to the product allows our team to make fewer individual decisions about topics."

Once the change is established, rather than seeing story summaries in the trending list, users will be able to see trending topics and the number of people who are talking about these topics. When the cursor is brought over a certain topic, it will automatically show selected original news story with a citation from the top article itself. It does not completely avoid human intervention though, experts are involved in the process to make sure that topics are real-world news and have no emphasis on internet trends like #dinner. In May, Facebook applied the changes and aimed at steering political bias out of its "trending" stories list despite the fact that an internal investigation clearly showed zero evidence stating that it was an issue.

Terminology in Facebook’s guidelines were updated by the company for clarity and it also provided reviewers refresher training that underlined content decisions may not be politically biased, stated the letter.

Additional oversight and controls were put on the review team and Facebook had stopped relying on lists of external news outlets and websites to measure the significance of topics in stories.

“We've built Facebook to be a platform for all ideas," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg averred on his social network page after a meeting at the company's California headquarters to talk about the allegations about anti-conservative bias.

Read Also:

AI-Powered Business Intelligence Is The Future

Home Based Solid Waste Management System Launched