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Microsoft follows Google with its own overhauled news app
Microsoft has overhauled its MSN News app for mobile. As you might expect, it's curated for your interests, offers breaking news alerts, support for widgets on both Android and iOS, continuous scrolling and a dark theme for reading at night. A blog post from Microsoft is quick to point out that its News service uses both human and AI editors to curate news stories, going so far as to explain how the process works (AI scans over 100,000 news stories from Microsoft's publishing partners, auto-suggests photos and then human editors "with local expertise" choose what's picked).
Facebook adds a link to Trending News in the app's main menu
The redesigned Trending Topics section of Facebook is now called Trending News and the updates to this feature -- which were announced in May -- are now available to most US users on both iOS and Android devices. For iPhone users, Trending News also has its own direct link in the Facebook app's main navigation menu -- a feature that's in testing for Android, according to TechCrunch.
Can we put the fake news genie back in the bottle?
The 2016 presidential campaign has definitively shown us that you shouldn't rely on Facebook for all of your news. Even at its best, you're likely to be exposed primarily to viewpoints and stories you already agree with. Being ensconced in a internet belief bubble takes away a lot of the nuance that exists in the real world -- while that lack of nuance likely helped Donald Trump become the next President of the United States. But beyond the narrow viewpoint that comes from getting news through Facebook is a bigger problem: Fake news has been proliferating on the site at a rapid pace. In August, Facebook made some changes to its "trending news" section, removing human editors and replacing them with an algorithm. Ironically, the move seemed like a response to reports that those human editors were biased against conservative news. Without those editors patrolling the trending section, it became much easier for false stories to slip through. Indeed, a false report about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly being fired spread like wildfire just days after the change was announced.
Facebook meets with Glenn Beck and other conservatives this week
Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg talked about meeting leading conservatives to explain the social network's trending topics selection, and it's clear that he's not wasting any time while making that happen. The company has confirmed that Zuck will meet with "about a dozen" conservative figures on May 18th, including outspoken media persona Glenn Beck. It's not clear exactly how things will go down, although Beck maintains that it's partly about assuring the right wing that this furor "won't happen again" -- he's operating on the assumption that Facebook did something wrong, which isn't necessarily true. He hopes that former presidential (and vice presidential) candidate Carly Fiorina will be involved, but Facebook hasn't confirmed this yet.
Humans keep Facebook's trending topics 'relevant'
Facebook's news operation depends on a team of human editors filtering through trending stories surfaced by its news algorithms, internal documents leaked to the Guardian show. The leak comes as the social media giant is denying reports that it suppresses conservative news stories and a Senate committee has expressed concern over Facebook's filtering methods.
Facebook denies filtering conservative news stories
Even if your Facebook News Feed is full of family members dropping racist memes or links to factually inaccurate articles, you might not see such showing up in the "trending news" portion of the social network's landing page. And there's a reason for that: Workers "routinely suppressed" news stories that'd interest conservative users from the section, according to a report from Gizmodo. Those stories apparently include anything about the Conservative Political Action Conference, two-time Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and posts from conservative news outlet The Drudge Report.
