Trying to get rid of human bias in its trending topics, Facebook will no longer employ humans to write descriptions for the section

You might have heard: Former Facebook news curators told Gizmodo they regularly suppressed conservative news from the site’s trending news section, butFacebook says it found no systematic bias in its own investigation

But did you know: Facebook will no longer employ humans to write the descriptions for its trending topics section, and has laid off the 15 to 18 people on its Trending team contracted through a third party, Quartz reports. Now, trending topics will appear as either a short phrase or single word with a number representing how many people are talking about the topic on Facebook. But, removing humans from trending topics doesn’t necessarily remove bias, Quartz notes: “Facebook’s primary reason for hiring human curators appeared to be to train their algorithms in what was newsworthy — and so it’s very likely their human biases were recorded and potentially amplified by the AI.”

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from American Press Institute http://ift.tt/2bG2luh