Facebook Trending Topics

» see facebook.com (right rail) as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

facebook trending never reached turkey. it was geofenced to five english-speaking markets at launch and stayed that way for its entire four-year life. the five were the us, the uk, india, canada, and australia. if you opened facebook from ankara through 2014 to 2018 the right rail showed events, group suggestions, the friend list, occasional sponsored content. it did not show a news module. trending topics existed for someone else's home page.

the feature launched on january 16 of 2014 as a small list of clickable headlines pinned to the right rail of the desktop web layout. each entry was a topic phrase with a one-line description underneath. you clicked one and got a topic feed of public posts, news articles, friend reactions related to the headline. the launch press described it as the social-graph answer to twitter trending hashtags, in those days.

the design assumption was that a small editorial team plus an algorithm could surface a useful headline set for an english-language reader who was checking facebook in the morning before opening any other news site. for the first two years that mostly worked. the right rail had a steady click-through and the team in menlo park curated the topic descriptions for tone. then 2016 happened.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

in may 2016 gizmodo published a report quoting former contract editors who said the trending team was routinely suppressing conservative-coded headlines from the module. really though. the story landed in the middle of the us election cycle and turned into a multi-week political pile-on. facebook ran an internal review, took a meeting with conservative media figures, and announced changes to the trending workflow at the end of august 2016.

the change pushed the feature off human editors and onto an algorithmic ranker with minimal human checking. inside a week the module was surfacing a fake news story claiming megyn kelly had been fired from fox news. the algorithm had no editorial backstop. for the rest of 2016 and through 2017 the trending box drifted from being a curated news strip to being a noisy aggregator of whatever the platform was talking about, which was often misinformation or unrelated celebrity events.

~ the postmortem ~

on june 1 of 2018 alex hardiman, facebook's head of news products, published a blog post announcing trending topics would be removed in the following week. the official reasons were two. first, the module was driving less than 1.5 percent of platform clicks to news publishers. second, the company was shifting toward video-first news products and a contextual breaking news label inside the news feed itself.

the bias-controversy backdrop was not named in the post but everyone reading it understood that the trending module had become a political liability the company was tired of defending. the removal landed without a migration plan for the small editorial vendor still working on the feature. that team was wound down through june 2018. the right rail kept the other modules.

~ what carried over ~

trending topics sits at the start of facebook's slow withdrawal from the news-distribution business that ran across 2018 to 2021. the platform deprioritised news links in the feed ranker. it ended the facebook news tab pilot in several markets. it pulled out of news-publisher revenue-share programs in others. the trending shutdown was the first publicly visible step in that broader retreat.

but the policy lesson the rest of the industry took from the saga is the one about algorithmic editorial. an automated headline module without a human editor is a moderation problem. a human-edited headline module inside a giant platform is a political problem. nobody has solved either side cleanly since.

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