Facebook will now select stories and excerpts automatically for Trending topic pages, show topics instead of story descriptions in Trending section
Today, we're making some changes to the Trending feature on Facebook that will make the product more automated and will no longer require people …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook is pulling humans out of its Trending module: stories and excerpts will now be selected automatically, and the section will display bare topics instead of story descriptions. The same day, Quartz reported that Facebook was cutting its entire Trending editorial staff — 15-18 workers hired through a third-party contractor — making clear the automation announcement was also a staffing decision.
The move matters because Trending was one of Facebook's few explicitly curated news surfaces. What follows in the corpus reads as a year of patching the replacement: by January 2017 Facebook had switched Trending to regional rather than personalized stories with publisher names under each topic, and by May it was redesigning the pages entirely to push users toward alternate news sources.
First-order effects
- Facebook's 15-18 contracted Trending editors lose their roles immediately, and story selection for the module passes to an algorithm with no human review layer.
- Publishers appearing in Trending lose their story descriptions in the module — placement now shows only the topic, shrinking the headline-and-summary real estate they previously got.
Second-order effects
- With personalization removed and publisher attribution added, Facebook's own follow-up changes show the algorithmic version underperforming on trust and diversity of sources, forcing repeated product revisions within months.
- Third-party contractors staffing platform editorial functions become a visible liability: the entire team sat outside Facebook's payroll, so the cut required no internal restructuring.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platforms replace human news curation wholesale and then retrofit quality signals after the fact — the same logic resurfaces in Facebook's 2020 decision to prioritize original reporting in the News Feed, where algorithmic selection stays but ranking weights encode editorial judgment.
- News distribution on social platforms consolidates around opaque ranking systems rather than editor desks, shifting publishers' leverage from relationships with curators to optimization against algorithms they cannot inspect.
The trend: Social platforms are swapping human news curation for algorithmic selection, then iteratively bolting editorial-quality signals back onto the algorithms.