Despite the increase in reliance of readers on social media for news, Facebook fails to live up to Twitter's standard of news publishing and circulation. It does not! Despite the increase in reliance of readers on social media for news, Facebook fails to live up to Twitter's standard of news publishing and circulation. The primary reason being that while Twitter users tend to keep their tweets public, Facebook users have private accounts where even the posts they comment on or share, are restricted to the users on their friend list.
The trending topics on both the platforms are not manually selected. They are chosen by an algorithm that looks for topics being posted/commented on/shared the most. That is what makes the Facebook 'trending' topics a little less unreliable since only the publicly shared posts go through the algorithm.
Twitter's 'hashtags' on the other hand are based on the millions of public tweets about news. Facebook's latest stint with the Cambridge Analytica leaves little scope for the company to make mistakes with regard to news and information publishing. It is therefore unsafe to keep up a feature that depends on skewed data.
Facebook's decision to shut the 'trending' feature came on Friday with the company's head of news production saying that over time people found this feature less and less useful. It only amounted to 1.5% clicks for news publishers on average.
"We will remove Trending from Facebook next week and we will also remove products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the Trends API," Alex Hardiman, Facebook's Head of News Products said in a statement on Friday.
Facebook introduced the Trending feature in 2014 aiming to help people discover news topics that were popular across the community.
However, the social media giant has decided to replace the 'trending' feature with other credible sources of news. The three ways in which it plans to bring news to consumers is through a 'breaking news' feature with help of publishers across nations; through a 'Today in' section that brings personalised news from local publishers, organisations, and publishers; and live coverage of news through videos for US consumers.
All these features are in a trial phase right now. The 'trending' feature will be terminated by the next week. The new feature might make or break the latest trends of news consumption in the world.
Facebook said it is running a test in several countries including in India to let publishers put a "breaking news" indicator on their posts in News Feed.
"We're also testing breaking news notifications," Hardiman said.
