TRENDING: ″Social Media Agency Sydney″
Simply click and drag your
cursor over a passage of
text from the article below
to tweet or share.
What’s the highest accolade someone can have bestowed upon them in the digital age? A Nobel Peace Prize? An Oscar? A Pulitzer? Nah. Surely it’s making it to the TRENDING section on Facebook. What’s cooler than solving a global conflict or being the best actor in world or writing an iconic piece of literature? A billion people knowing your name.
The ‘Trending News’ tab was first introduced in January 2014 and, according to recent data from Facebook, 600 million people see a news story on Facebook each week.
Very good, but how do I get “Social Media Agency Sydney” to trump the news of the day and trend? Is it up to the respective community managers from every agency within the city to band together and make an impassioned meme-plea to Facebook?
Sadly not. Gizmodo revealed the not-exactly-pretty (especially if you have a background is journalism ethics) details of how Facebook trends begin in an article last week.
Gizmodo interviewed five former “news curators” – a team of a dozen or so contracted journalists work in the trending news department (located in the basement of the company’s New York office, no less) – about their experiences.
Per the piece: “According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. ‘We choose what’s trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.’”
It gets worse, though: “We were housed in a conference room for two-and-a-half months,” said one former curator (all former curators insisted on anonymity out of concerns over violating their non-disclosure agreements with Facebook). “It was clear that Zuckerberg could squash the project at any moment.
“It was degrading as a human being,” said another. “We weren’t treated as individuals. We were treated in this robot way.”
So there you go, social media friends: the trending news algorithm isn’t an algorithm at all, but a team of journos in a basement. Anyone got any New York connections?
Daniel Steiner
