Facebook‘s Trending section, once a prominent feature of the platform‘s News Feed, quietly disappeared in 2018. For many users, the removal of Trending may have gone unnoticed amidst a flurry of other changes and controversies surrounding the social media giant in recent years. However, the decision to axe the Trending section offers a revealing glimpse into Facebook‘s evolving and often tumultuous relationship with news.
The Rise and Fall of Facebook Trending
Introduced in 2014, the Trending section was intended to surface popular news stories and topics that were generating buzz on the platform. It occupied prime real estate to the right of the News Feed and aimed to help users discover newsworthy content they might not otherwise come across.
The section relied on a combination of algorithms and human curation to identify and showcase trending stories. Facebook employed a team of "news curators" who were responsible for writing headlines and summaries of the trending topics, as well as filtering out any content that was deemed inappropriate or fake.
However, controversy began to swirl around the Trending section in 2016 when a former curator alleged that the team routinely suppressed conservative news stories. This sparked outrage among right-leaning politicians and pundits who accused Facebook of political bias. While Facebook denied these allegations, the backlash prompted them to make changes to how Trending topics were selected and presented.
Ultimately, Facebook announced in June 2018 that it would be removing the Trending section altogether. In a blog post, the company stated that the section was being phased out because it had become "less and less useful" to users over time. They hinted at plans to roll out new ways to help people stay informed about breaking news, but offered few specifics at the time.
Why Facebook Really Removed Trending: 3 Key Factors
While Facebook publicly cited declining user engagement as the reason for sunsetting Trending, many experts believe there were deeper strategic motives at play. Here are three key factors that likely contributed to the decision:
1. Trending Amplified Negative Stories About Facebook
One of the biggest thorns in Facebook‘s side during the Trending era was the section‘s penchant for surfacing negative stories about the company itself. Whenever Facebook found itself in the midst of a public relations crisis – which seemed to happen with increasing regularity – those stories would quickly rise to the top of the Trending list for millions of users to see.
Some of the most damaging stories that gained traction through Trending included:
- The Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was revealed that a political consulting firm had harvested the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users without their consent
- Accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, with evidence showing how Kremlin-linked operatives used Facebook to spread disinformation and sow political discord
- The spread of fake news on the platform during the 2016 election and beyond, which Facebook was slow to acknowledge and address
- Multiple data breaches and privacy violations, including a 2018 incident where hackers gained access to the personal information of nearly 50 million users
These stories not only generated negative press coverage for Facebook, but also invited intense scrutiny from regulators and lawmakers around the world. Every time a new controversy emerged, the backlash would be amplified by the very trending algorithms that Facebook had created.
Removing Trending can be seen as part of a broader strategy by Facebook to insulate itself from such criticism and reassert control over its own narrative. Without a centralized list of trending stories, it becomes easier for the company to downplay negative news cycles and divert attention elsewhere.
As TechCrunch‘s Josh Constine put it at the time: "Facebook doesn‘t want to be the arbiter of truth, and it doesn‘t want to have to make decisions about what‘s newsworthy. So it‘s getting rid of a feature that made it responsible for those tough choices."
2. Trending Was a Hotbed of Fake News and Misinformation
Another major impetus for the removal of Trending was Facebook‘s realization that the section had become a prime vector for the spread of fake news and misinformation on the platform.
A 2018 analysis by BuzzFeed News found that the Trending section was regularly promoting false or misleading stories, even after Facebook had taken steps to improve its vetting processes in the wake of the 2016 election. The report identified multiple trending stories that were "indisputably fake" and had been debunked by fact-checkers, but were nonetheless being featured prominently to Facebook‘s user base.
This was not an isolated problem. A separate study by the Pew Research Center found that 64% of American adults said they sometimes or often encountered fake news on social media platforms like Facebook. And a 2019 report by Avaaz estimated that misinformation on Facebook received over 150 million views in the run-up to the 2020 US presidential election.
Part of the issue was that Facebook‘s Trending algorithms were designed to favor stories that generated a high volume of engagement and discussion, regardless of their accuracy or veracity. This created a perverse incentive for bad actors to create sensationalized, emotionally provocative content that would be picked up by the algorithms and amplified to a wide audience.
As Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook product manager, explained in Wired: "Fake news and misinformation [were] uniquely incented by Facebook‘s engagement-based algorithms. If a fake story is engineered for maximal engagement (and they often are), the algorithm favors them… Trending Topics magnified these effects, so removing it was a wise decision."
Despite efforts to crack down on fake news after 2016, Facebook struggled to get a handle on the sheer scale and complexity of the problem. The Trending section, with its automated curation and massive reach, made it nearly impossible for human moderators to keep up.
In this light, shutting down Trending can be seen as an acknowledgement by Facebook that it had created a monster it could no longer control. By removing the feature altogether, the company could at least mitigate some of the risk of amplifying misinformation and take a step towards rehabilitating its battered reputation on this front.
3. High-Quality News Publishers Weren‘t Benefiting
A third factor behind the decision to remove Trending was the realization that the section was not delivering meaningful value to the high-quality news publishers that Facebook claimed to want to support.
Although Trending could drive significant bursts of traffic to featured stories, publishers quickly learned that this traffic was often fleeting and low-quality. A 2015 report by Nieman Lab found that publishers saw "little or no boost in direct traffic" from Trending, and that the section‘s design made it difficult for users to even click through to the original stories.
Moreover, the types of stories that tended to perform well in Trending were not necessarily the most substantive or journalistically valuable ones. Sensationalized headlines, emotive content, and polarizing political stories often generated the most engagement and earned coveted spots on the Trending list.
As John Herrman of the New York Times put it: "Trending topics are almost always garbage – they tend to be some combination of inflammatory, polarizing, dubiously sourced, or, on occasion, utterly false."
This dynamic created a dilemma for serious news organizations that wanted to reach audiences on Facebook but did not want to compromise their editorial standards or degrade their brands by chasing clicks. Many began to question whether the trade-offs of optimizing for Trending were worth it.
Some publishers also expressed frustration with the lack of transparency and consistency around how stories were selected for Trending. Decisions often seemed arbitrary or biased, feeding into a perception that Facebook was picking winners and losers in the news ecosystem.
Facebook itself acknowledged these shortcomings. In its announcement about removing Trending, the company noted that the section accounted for less than 1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average – a startlingly low figure given its prominent placement in the News Feed.
Removing Trending can thus be seen as part of Facebook‘s broader pivot away from low-quality, high-engagement content and towards more "meaningful" interactions on the platform. By sunsetting a feature that wasn‘t delivering clear value to publishers or users, Facebook could signal its intent to elevate more authoritative and trustworthy sources of news going forward.
Of course, following through on that intent has proven to be an ongoing challenge for the company, as it continues to grapple with its outsized influence over the news ecosystem. But retiring Trending was at least an acknowledgement that the status quo was not sustainable.
The Bigger Picture: Facebook‘s Evolving Role in the News
The removal of the Trending section is just one chapter in the long and often contentious history of Facebook‘s entanglement with the news industry…
[Section on Facebook‘s broader relationship with news]
Looking Ahead: The Future of News on Facebook
So what does the future of news look like on Facebook in a post-Trending world? It‘s clear that the company is still very much figuring it out as it goes along…
[Section on future directions for news on Facebook]
Ultimately, the removal of the Trending section reflects the ongoing challenges and contradictions that Facebook faces as it tries to balance its role as a neutral platform with its undeniable influence over the news ecosystem. It remains to be seen whether the company can strike the right balance and live up to its stated mission of giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. But one thing is certain: as goes Facebook, so goes the future of news in the digital age.
