Not so long ago, I wrote about a controversy surrounding Facebook. A former Facebook employee revealed that in their Trending List, they often suppressed and censored right-wing conservative based articles. This controversy isn’t going away anytime soon.
Even Senators like John Thune (R-S.D.) are asking questions. A correspondent on Yahoo News put up an interesting display of Facebook Trending. These are supposed to be the top trending news articles of that particular day. Some topics have valiant and credible news, like Wal-Mart suing Visa over RFID chipped credit cards. It has credible pop culture stories, like Budweiser changing beer label to ‘America’ until the November presidential elections. But the majority of the articles are pure fluff. For instance, one story that made the top trending list is Steve Lombardi, a WWE wrestled who performed under the name Brooklyn Brawler since the 1980s, was released. Even most WWE fans probably don’t know who the Brooklyn Brawler is. This concerns me because 61% of Millennials, born between 1981-1999, get their news from Facebook. That’s according to a 2015 Pew Charitable study. What’s even more disturbing is according to PolitiFact, the majority of stories are on some level made up. Not so long ago, Breitbart got in trouble for posting not-so-true stories. But now that they’ve become Trump supporters, they rarely make it in the trending section.
I am not here to endorse any presidential candidate. But I think Facebook should be a little more discerning about what goes in the trending box. But we can’t blame all of this on Facebook. We as consumers have to share some of the blame. When we care more about the Kardashians than we do about the Middle East, what do you think is going to trend? When we care more about Kelly Ripa and Michael Strayhan’s TV split more than we do about injustice in our community, what do you think will trend? When we care more about Beyonce’s Lemonade sales than we do about corruption in high places, what will trend? So what’s worse than trending? Is it the people who are driving the popularity of these stories?