Facebook headquaters. | LPS.1 Facebook tweaks 'Trending Topics' to fight fake news

Facebook is making a series of updates to the platform’s Trending Topics feature, making changes that the social media site says will surface topics that publishers are writing about sooner.

Beginning Wednesday, the topics that appear in Facebook’s Trending Topics box will be calculated algorithmically by looking at the number of publishers posting articles on Facebook about certain topics, instead of relying on the amount of engagement. Facebook’s vice president of product management, Will Cathcart, said that the feature should help with the hoax news articles appearing on the site, a problem for which Facebook has faced criticism.

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“Today’s update may also prevent hoaxes and fake news from appearing in Trending because the updated system identifies groups of articles shared on Facebook instead of relying solely on mentions of a topic,” he wrote in a blog post about the update.

Additionally, headlines from publishers will appear under Trending Topics to provide users with additional information and a news source to find out more. Those headlines, Facebook said, will be “automatically selected based on a combination of factors including the engagement around the article on Facebook, the engagement around the publisher overall, and whether other articles are linking to it.”

Facebook is also rolling out a feature to personalize Trending Topics based on a user’s interests and a user’s geographic region.

“This is designed to help make sure people dont’ miss important topics being discussed on Facebook that might not show up in their News Feed,” Cathcart wrote.

Trending Topics, which appears on the upper right-hand-side of Facebook’s desktop version and within the Search bar on Facebook’s mobile app, has been the subject of controversy at the social media publisher after a former employee told Gizmodo last year that people working on the feature were “suppressing” conservative news. Facing backlash, Facebook laid off its curators and moved to an algorithmic model, which created a host of new problems, including the occasional hoax news story that landed in the Trending box.

Earlier this month, Facebook rolled out a slate of new products aimed at establishing “stronger ties between Facebook and the news industry,” and hired ex-CNN anchor Campbell Brown to lead a team devoted to news partnerships.

