It didn’t take long for Facebook’s algorithm to make its first mistake. Just two days after Facebook announced that it would replace its editors with robots, problems began as a fake article about Fox News host Megyn Kelly spread through the Trending option on Facebook.
The fake article stated that Kelly had been fired from her position due to political reasons related to the current presidential campaign in the U.S. After more than a million Facebook users read the article, the news was removed from the site on Monday morning, and Facebook issued an apology for the problems caused by the article.
It is clear that the algorithm Facebook started using for this option is not yet sufficiently developed to perform its tasks independently, as it should have immediately detected such news as false.
As a reminder, on Friday, the decision of the leaders of the social network Facebook was announced regarding changes in certain segments of the business, namely that the people who select news will be replaced by an algorithm and that notifications on the site will become automated.
This is about the trending option that was introduced in 2014 as a means to “help users discover interesting and relevant notifications on Facebook, such as current news and events from around the world” – they stated in a press release.
