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Facebook hasn't been filtering their trending news for about a week now, and in that time some of the top stories have been

- A man having sex with a chicken sandwich

- A fake story about Fox News firing Ann Coulter

- A fake article about the iphone 8, claiming tim cook said Siri is going to do your chores for you.

So yeah maybe the people were kinda needed?

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Depends on what function you want the trending news feature to serve. If you want an unbiased view of what's currently popular on FB, this is better. If you want real, noteworthy news the this is probably worse.

You can get away without people when you have a set list of sources like google news does.

They did this previously. The problem was that this disqualifies most news outlets operating on the fringes of reality. Since this includes most of the favorite news sources of tea-partiers it obviously can't stand. I don't particularly like the Democratic party, but any news site labeling itself as "right wing news" is for nutters. Facebook censored those sites and the nutters got angry and that's how we got here.

Google News covers plenty of "right wing" news. One can only think FB is intentionally letting quality fall in order to show they really had to do something.

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