Fire a team -> Man masturbating with McChicken to all your customers

[I'm a Puppy!]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-fires-trending-topics-team-algorithm

Just months after the discovery that Facebook’s “trending” news module was curated and tweaked by human beings, the company has eliminated its editors and left the algorithm to do its job. The results, so far, are a disaster.

Facebook announced late Friday that it had eliminated jobs in its trending module, the part of its news division where staff curated popular news for Facebook users. Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a false story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a controversial piece about a comedian’s four-letter word attack on rightwing pundit Ann Coulter, and links to an article about a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald’s chicken sandwich.

In a blogpost, Facebook said the decision to drop people from the news module would allow it to operate at a greater scale.

“Our goal is to enable Trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied solely on summarizing topics by hand,” wrote a company representative in the unattributed post. “A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time.”
Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show
Read more

A source familiar with the matter told the Guardian that the trending team was fired without notice in a meeting with a security guard present. The ex-employees received four weeks’ severance.

In May, the Guardian was the first to reveal the extent to which Facebook’s news algorithm was being guided by humans. The revelation fuelled accusations of potential bias at the social network, which has become the world’s largest distributor of news.

The past weekend has been less than auspicious for Facebook’s new, inhuman workforce: on Saturday, the site pushed an article to some of its users entitled: “BREAKING: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out For Backing Hillary.” Megyn Kelly is still employed by Fox News and has not endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.

Facebook removed the offending article, published by a website called Ending the Fed and linking to another little known site, Conservative 101. Under Facebook’s old guidelines, news curators stuck to a list of trusted media sources. Neither of these sources were on that list.

Another surprising headline read: “SNL Star Calls Ann Coulter a Racist C*nt,” and referred to attacks on the author during a Comedy Central roast of actor Rob Lowe. Other trending items picked by algorithm were pegged to Twitter hashtags including #McChicken, a hashtag that had gone viral after someone posted a video of a man masturbating with a McChicken sandwich.

Under its old, human-assisted guidelines, Facebook trends had been monitored to weed out potentially offensive or inappropriate items.

The dismissal of the trending module team appears to have been a long-term plan at Facebook. A source told the Guardian the trending module was meant to have “learned” from the human editors’ curation decisions and was always meant to eventually reach full automation.

Don't really know how they didn't see it coming. It'd be ridiculously easy to be like "Hey, why don't we run this in test for a month before we, you know, release this to everyone in the world?" I mean it's tech 101 kids

[Great Rumbler]

As we all learned with No Man's Sky, algorithm-generated content is not a worthwhile replacement for content hand-crafted by an actual human.

[Madrun Badrun]

No fuck that.  I wanna live in a word of racist teenage chatbots.  Hence why I spend so much time playing COD. 

[thisismyusername]

The algorithm doesn't show those articles on the trend. It only gives you a Subject like "Rob Lowe." It's the top-headline that is a problem. Facebook needs to tweak that and/or Regular Expression certain words to have the algorithm skip over those.

I'd rather the AI be impartial and give me news that I may not want (which I can then tell it not to show me IIRC that's still there), over human bias that had certain articles/subjects banned or hidden.

[Momo]

The algorithm doesn't show those articles on the trend. It only gives you a Subject like "Rob Lowe." It's the top-headline that is a problem. Facebook needs to tweak that and/or Regular Expression certain words to have the algorithm skip over those.

I'd rather the AI be impartial and give me news that I may not want (which I can then tell it not to show me IIRC that's still there), over human bias that had certain articles/subjects banned or hidden.

This.

Also even though I dont want to know about a guy fapping with a chicken patty, I kinda *do* want to know that everyone else wants to know this and it's the most talked about topic for that time period

[Brehvolution]

Using facebook for news

[Joe Molotov]

The McChicken represents White Privilege and the man represents illegal immigrants flowing through our southern border.

[thisismyusername]

The McChicken represents White Privilege and the man represents illegal immigrants flowing through our southern border.

TRUMP 2016: MAKE FACEBOOK GREAT AGAIN

[brob]

Don't really know how they didn't see it coming. It'd be ridiculously easy to be like "Hey, why don't we run this in test for a month before we, you know, release this to everyone in the world?" I mean it's tech 101 kids

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/08/how_facebook_s_trending_news_feature_went_from_messy_to_disastrous.html

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

I always assumed the trends were BS to begin with.  Facebook sends multiple e-mails where things are trending and 90% of it is BS.

[I'm a Puppy!]

LOL, someone's obviously figured out Facebook's trending algorithm and has leveraged it to put "Porn as it happens" links on much of the trending stuff. Gee, who would've thought that someone on the internet would figure out your automated code and exploit it? That's NEVER happened before.

[chronovore]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/29/facebook-fires-trending-topics-team-algorithm

Just months after the discovery that Facebook’s “trending” news module was curated and tweaked by human beings, the company has eliminated its editors and left the algorithm to do its job. The results, so far, are a disaster.

Facebook announced late Friday that it had eliminated jobs in its trending module, the part of its news division where staff curated popular news for Facebook users. Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a false story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a controversial piece about a comedian’s four-letter word attack on rightwing pundit Ann Coulter, and links to an article about a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald’s chicken sandwich.

In a blogpost, Facebook said the decision to drop people from the news module would allow it to operate at a greater scale.

“Our goal is to enable Trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied solely on summarizing topics by hand,” wrote a company representative in the unattributed post. “A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time.”
Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show
Read more

A source familiar with the matter told the Guardian that the trending team was fired without notice in a meeting with a security guard present. The ex-employees received four weeks’ severance.

In May, the Guardian was the first to reveal the extent to which Facebook’s news algorithm was being guided by humans. The revelation fuelled accusations of potential bias at the social network, which has become the world’s largest distributor of news.

The past weekend has been less than auspicious for Facebook’s new, inhuman workforce: on Saturday, the site pushed an article to some of its users entitled: “BREAKING: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out For Backing Hillary.” Megyn Kelly is still employed by Fox News and has not endorsed Hillary Clinton for president.

Facebook removed the offending article, published by a website called Ending the Fed and linking to another little known site, Conservative 101. Under Facebook’s old guidelines, news curators stuck to a list of trusted media sources. Neither of these sources were on that list.

Another surprising headline read: “SNL Star Calls Ann Coulter a Racist C*nt,” and referred to attacks on the author during a Comedy Central roast of actor Rob Lowe. Other trending items picked by algorithm were pegged to Twitter hashtags including #McChicken, a hashtag that had gone viral after someone posted a video of a man masturbating with a McChicken sandwich.

Under its old, human-assisted guidelines, Facebook trends had been monitored to weed out potentially offensive or inappropriate items.

The dismissal of the trending module team appears to have been a long-term plan at Facebook. A source told the Guardian the trending module was meant to have “learned” from the human editors’ curation decisions and was always meant to eventually reach full automation.

Don't really know how they didn't see it coming. It'd be ridiculously easy to be like "Hey, why don't we run this in test for a month before we, you know, release this to everyone in the world?" I mean it's tech 101 kids

Maybe the people making the decisions about which programs to make live had also previously been replaced by algorithms?

[chronovore]

No fuck that.  I wanna live in a word of racist teenage chatbots.  Hence why I spend so much time playing COD.

This made me laugh so fucking hard.

[Syph]

As we all learned with No Man's Sky, algorithm-generated content is not a worthwhile replacement for content hand-crafted by an actual human.

What do Facebook trending and NMS have in common?
They both lack multiplayer