Facebook's Trending section shows fake Megyn Kelly story days after firm lays off curators; company removes story, says is working on better detecting fake news
Gina Hall / Silicon Valley Business Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's Trending section had already been through a credibility crisis by mid-2016: former contractors described politically slanted curation practices in detailed accounts of how the trending team operated, prompting scrutiny of the human editors behind the module. The company's answer was to cut the curators and lean on automation — and within days of those layoffs, a fabricated Megyn Kelly story surfaced in Trending with no human gatekeeper to catch it.
The failure landed at the start of a sequence that defined Facebook's next year: December's warning-label system built on unpaid third-party checkers like Snopes and AP, and January's shift to regional rather than personalized trending topics as the company kept reworking the module.
First-order effects
- Facebook pulled the fake Megyn Kelly story and publicly committed to better fake-news detection, but the immediate damage was to the automation-first Trending product it had just stripped of human reviewers.
- Megyn Kelly and Fox News bore the direct cost of the fabrication, since the false headline ran under a real, high-profile name in a section users treat as vetted news.
Second-order effects
- The visible failure gave Facebook's critics concrete evidence that removing curators traded bias complaints for accuracy failures, hardening the political pressure that later produced the third-party flagging arrangement with Snopes and AP.
- Publishers named in false trending headlines now face reputational risk they cannot control, raising the stakes of whatever ranking and labeling rules Facebook adopts next.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform news modules converge on a hybrid model — algorithms for scale, outsourced fact-checkers for verification — because neither pure human curation nor pure automation survived 2016's scrutiny.
- Moderation design increasingly bends to political perception: the same pressure environment that drove the curator layoffs later led Facebook to shelve a fake-news-detection update over fears it would disproportionately affect right-wing sites, making perceived neutrality a design constraint on its own.
The trend: Social platforms are replacing in-house human news editors with algorithmic feeds plus external fact-checking, trading one set of credibility failures for another.