Facebook to shut down Trending after four years and tests new features, including a breaking news label that publishers can add to stories and Today In section
Facebook is shutting down its sometimes-problematic “trending” news section after four years.
Context & Ripple Effects
Trending's end closes out a four-year arc that began with the five-category test in 2015 and was reshaped repeatedly under pressure: Facebook cut its contracted editorial staff of 15-18 workers in 2016 (per Quartz reporting), then moved to regional rather than personalized topics in early 2017 (the regional shift).
The replacement strategy was already visible before the shutdown announcement — Facebook had been expanding a breaking news label beta to 50 more publishers across four regions in March 2018, and was testing the Today In local news module that would later reach hundreds of US cities.
First-order effects
- Publishers lose a referral surface entirely: whatever traffic Trending sent them disappears, while the breaking news label shifts visibility from Facebook's own topic list to stories publishers tag themselves.
- Facebook removes the last remnant of the human-curated news product whose editorial team it disbanded in 2016, completing the move to algorithmic and publisher-driven surfaces.
Second-order effects
- Newsrooms that optimized headlines for Trending placement must redirect effort toward earning the breaking news label and local distribution through Today In, changing how they package and time stories for Facebook.
- Competing platforms face the same question of whether curated news modules justify their controversy-to-traffic ratio, since Facebook is effectively declaring the format not worth the operational burden.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform news distribution consolidates around tools publishers control — labels, sections, local modules — rather than platform-edited front pages, reducing platforms' direct editorial role but raising questions about who verifies what gets flagged as breaking or local.
The trend: Social platforms are retreating from hand-curated news surfaces toward publisher-applied labels and localized modules, with Facebook's shutdown of Trending marking the clearest data point yet.