Leaked Facebook manual shows editors have near-total control over trending topics

A leaked manual intended for Facebook employees working with its trending news module shows that while algorithms play a big part in the social network’s curation of events, it’s the human editors that have the final say. Published today by The Guardian, the document also says that human editors can inject topics into the trending bar manually to either replace another topic or to add a new one. The guidelines state that editors can only manually add topics that are already appearing in its ‘review’ and ‘demo’ tools, even if it’s deemed newsworthy. The surfacing of the document is sure to…

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