What I want to tell you about fake news after my job at Facebook Earlier this year, the people who worked on Facebook’s trending news bar- the brief news story summaries you see every […]

Earlier this year, the people who worked on Facebook’s trending news bar- the brief news story summaries you see every time you log on – were fired without notice, called abruptly to a meeting with a security guard present.

For the team of ‘News Curators’ behind the trending section, their exile from the New York offices with a month’s severance was the tragic conclusion of a series of unfortunate events, started by an anonymous employee coming forward to say that the team were deliberately suppressing right-wing news.

This led to Mark Zuckerberg sitting down with the biggest names in the US right-wing media. Then the team of journalists were scrapped so an algorithm could take over and “scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time,” to quote Facebook’s newsroom blog.

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But without a human hand, the algorithm highlighted fake news story after fake news story. Facebook’s 1.79 billion users were told that Fox anchor Megyn Kelly was fired for supporting Hillary Clinton (astronomically untrue) and one story that said the World Trade Center collapsed due to “controlled explosions.”

Without humans at the helm, Facebook couldn’t tell that a man pleasuring himself with a Chicken McSandwich (and not by eating it) was probably not the biggest story of the week.

Facebook and the rise of fake news

Facebook denied that they were a media company and could be held accountable. That’s in spite of the fact that nearly two thirds of Americans get their news from social media outlets.

Meanwhile, as the US Election ramped up, more and more hoax news stories were appearing in people’s feeds, looking just as real as genuine ones, unless you really sifted through and analysed the content. What had happened to the trending bar was now happening to everyone’s feeds. All articles look the same when they’re circulating on the same site.

Now, after critiques that Facebook allowed tin-foil theories and lies to run rampant, the company have decided to hire human third parties to flag up inaccurate or fake news stories that appear in feeds.

It’s all well and good for Facebook to finally decide that humans are needed to assess real news from false.

However in the process of hiding from this fact, Facebook caused many voters to absorb increasingly biased, and often totally false, feeds of ‘news’ on their website. It also cost nearly 30 journalists their jobs.

It’s even more annoying because I was one of those journalists.

What it was like to be a Facebook News Curator

In 2015 I was one of Facebook’s ‘News Curators’, charged with finding real stories people were sharing on Facebook and writing up a brief synopsis for the trending bar. I dodged being forcibly ejected, due to my US work visa expiring.

Our team would sift through topics that people were discussing on Facebook and distinguish between the ones that were just frequently discussed topics (Beyonce, for example) and the conversations that arose in response to a certain news story (Hillary Clinton’s email server, for example.)

Any story that was widely reported and being talked about on Facebook had to be written up – whether we believed it was newsworthy or not – often we employed liberal use of the word ‘reportedly’ to hedge our bets when it was concerning a celebrity. Writing about a story involved a brief headline and a slightly longer paragraph explaining some further details, and all text was documented in a separate shared file as well for anybody to look over.

Once we wrote it up, unless it was a story being reported across international media as their top story (e.g. the earthquake in Nepal, or the UK General Election) the story would appear in your trending bar based on what content you interacted with regularly: if your trending bar showed you stories about Kendall Jenner everyday, that wasn’t because of us. It was because that’s the stuff you clicked on while you told your friends off for not sharing enough ‘meaningful stuff’ on social media. However if the story was not being reported by multiple trustworthy news outlets, and if it lacked solid reporting, the story could be ‘blacklisted.’

Blacklisted stories (you couldn’t blacklist an entire site) were documented on shared files that were checked by every team when a new shift started- there was a team on every hour of every day- to make sure they were removed correctly, and stories could always return to the feed several hours later if they were indeed actual news stories. Nothing could be deleted forever from the feed, because we were not allowed to show any editorial voice. The only way a story could disappear was if people stopped talking about it.

It was perhaps this ability that led one whistleblower to tell the media that Facebook employees were suppressing right-wing stories. After all, research shows that right-wing outlets are more likely to fabricate stories. Some are even trying to suggest legitimate news stories full of actual reporting are false because they don’t align with their views. But the process of blacklisting was so ruthlessly documented that it would take dozens of people a great deal of work to systematically shut down a story so that it could never appear in the trending panel. I never saw this happen. We were too busy learning how to cover the Indian Premier League from an office in New York to conspire against the Conservative party.

Journalists are imperfect

The curation team was not without its flaws. One colleague described the experience as “the most toxic work experience of my life.” Another shared some of her most and least favourite moments of working there on Twitter after the team was disbanded once and for all:

https://twitter.com/sairakh/status/770315229750239233

https://twitter.com/sairakh/status/770315603806748673

https://twitter.com/sairakh/status/770316449244151808

But when we spoke to each other in the wake of our team’s dissolving- in between getting hounded by news outlets to report anonymously on the company we once worked for- we all spoke of how outrageous the original complaints were.

We may have been imperfect creatures, after all, but we were journalists. We believed in conveying the news to the largest audience possible. Facebook was the largest audience, and we worked tirelessly to make sure we didn’t mess up on so large a scale.

Now Facebook has realised that sometimes a human’s common sense, and a reporter’s ability to check the veracity of sources and quotes, is a necessary factor when you’re both a major platform for almost all news outlets, as well as being one of the main places people digest and disseminate news. It is great that they have finally decided to help fight the spreading of false information. I just wish they hadn’t spent all of 2016 helping to promote lies.