According to Forbes.com, the world’s largest social networking site will no longer be using human to write news. “Content Curators” (Facebook’s title for the digital reporter role) were informed that the Trending product would become automated. Sources inside the organization said the decision was abrupt and unexpected.
The source inside the organization said that they often joked that it is inevitable that their job will be replaced with robots, and that the position was essentially to train an algorithm to write the news.
The company said in a press release on Friday, that the trending was started in 2014. And it was made to help people discover interesting and relevant conversations happening on Facebook, about breaking news and events from around the world.
There were allegations that Facebook workers normally suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section. This is to prevent stories and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section.
Some workers said that they were instructed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module. To prevent it from happening, Facebook use algorithm that accurately curates articles based on unbiased variables, such as shares, likes, and comments.
However, Facebook said that they already made investigation about these claims and found no evidence of systematic bias, and that the new product would help reduce “individual decisions on products.”
According to the company, the move to automate the news would increase accessibility, “A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time.” Some editors will be kept to ensure news topics are still real-world events.
Earlier this year, Microsoft also launched a chatbot on Twitter named Tay. It was created to speak like a teenage girl who learns from real-world conversations, picking up slang and updates from trending topics. Tay demonstrated an extraordinary capability to copy human language and produce meaningful phrases.
Advantages and Disadvantages in using algorithm were discussed in the video. Please share your thoughts and comments below.
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