Facebook fires trending team, and algorithm without humans goes crazy

theguardian.com

12 pointsoldbuzzard5 comments

I find it hard to believe that fb released this without first testing it in the background for at least a week. That being said, what caused the algorithm to start producing bad results so shortly after it was released. Was it just bad luck or was someone playing the system?

> Under Facebook’s old guidelines, news curators stuck to a list of trusted media sources. Neither of these sources were on that list.

And if they are replacing humans with algorithms, why ditch the existing list of trusted media sources? They are orthogonal changes. The trusted sources list would have kept the algorithms on a tighter leash.

Great point. Something definitely seems odd about this mistake.

Yellow journalism is a politicized issue in 2016.

Maybe firing the team just revealed a bad algorithm, and now they should fix the algorithm.

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