Facebook has reportedly fired the entire editorial team responsible for writing the story descriptions that show up in the Trending Topics section on the popular social networking site.
In a blog post on Friday, the company announced that Facebook Trending Topics will be more automated and will no longer require people to write descriptions. Now, a report on Quartz says that the company has fired 15 to 18 contractors hired to write short descriptions of each Trending Topics item.
The editorial staff was hired through third-party and the Trending team’s staff were alerted at 4pm that they were being fired—as the news of Facebook’s switch to algorithms first broke—and were asked to leave the building by 5pm,” the Quartz report said.
It adds the editors completed just over a year before being fired by Facebook.
Facebook made these changes to its Trending Topics feature after it faced criticism earlier this year over claims the service was suppressing conservative views.
Now, the only humans involved with Trending Topics will be Facebook engineers who correct flaws in the algorithm, like ensuring that the same news item doesn’t show up on the list twice with slightly different names, the Quartz report added.
This Trending feature was added to Facebook in 2014, and shows personalised topics based on the likes of users, the kind of Facebook pages and the trending stories they have liked and what all is trending worldwide.
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