Facebook Trending 9/11 Topic Dropped After A Hoax Story Was Promoted

Facebook's Trending Topics has recently received a lot of heat for surfacing an article that discussed a conspiracy theory about the 9/11 attacks as the leading link for the topic "September 11th Anniversary." In response to public criticisms, Facebook first removed the article listing from the topic's search results page and then decided to remove the topic altogether.

The writeup in question, titled "September 11: The footage that 'proves bombs were planted in Twin Towers,'" is one from Rachel O'Donoghue of Daily Star, a British daily tabloid newspaper. The article was published on Sept. 7, Wednesday, and was stripped out of Trending Topics on Sept. 9, Friday.

"We're aware a hoax article showed up there and as a temporary step to resolving this we've removed the topic," a Facebook spokesperson told the Washington Post.

A similar topic, "September 11 Memorials and Services," which had a Time article as the leading link, was later listed.

A week prior to this incident, Trending Topics was also involved in a controversy for listing an erroneous topic, which stated that Fox News exposed reporter Megyn Kelly is a traitor and was fired for backing Hillary Clinton. The topic's leading link pointed to an article published on endingthefed.com. Reactions to the incident prompted the social network platform to take down the topic. Facebook then issued an apology in which a more accurate and quicker detection of hoax and satirical news stories was promised.

Of course, the more recent incident with the 9/11 topic also didn't go unnoticed.

Bear in mind that the Facebook Trending Topics algorithm is assigned a number of tasks. One is the identification of potential trending topics based on their volume and spikes in mentions over a short period of time within Facebook. It also cross-references the mentions with external sources to identify breaking events.

Another is curating topic descriptions and pulling excerpts from news stories that were published by sources in Facebook's list of media outlets — a task that was previously handled by a team of humans but was taken over by an algorithm because of the team's alleged biases.

However, it should also be noted that the entire process for listing topics on Trending Topics isn't fully automated and that humans still play a hand in ensuring the quality of topics that appear. This is especially true for determining which of the potential trending topics makes it to the live list.

"The review team is responsible for accepting all algorithmically detected topics that reflect real-world events," states the Trending Topics guidelines [PDF] that Facebook released in August 2016.

The problem with the 9/11 topic incident is not the topic per se but the leading link that it surfaced. The algorithm determines the leading link based on metrics of Facebook's pool of trusted media outlets, and the article from dailystar.com.uk, which is included in that pool, happened to be on top.

Section 4 of the guidelines details the review team's standard procedure for accepting a topic that will make it to the live list: review detected topic name >> review unique keyword > fill in relevant metadata fields >> accept topic >> hit "Send for review" for QA review. Not one step mentions anything regarding the leading link.

Hence, even if the previous team of humans who curated the topic descriptions and short story summaries weren't replaced by a set of codes, the leading link that was showed for the topic would still have been the same because that's an aspect that they do not handle. It's quite unfair to blame the defenseless algorithm when the fault mainly lies on Facebook's list of sources.

Nonetheless, one has to wonder where the review team was when this was listed.