Facebook fires human editors for robots & it all goes wrong...

Following Facebook’s announcement on Friday that employees who worked on the ‘trending’ section of their website would be made redundant – with the algorithm taking over – a false story and a pornographic link, amongst others, were published.

Facebook wrote in a blog post announcing the news last week: “Our goal is to enable trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied solely on summarising topics by hand.

“A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time. This is something we always hoped to do but we are making these changes sooner given the feedback we got from the Facebook community earlier this year.”

A source familiar with the matter informed The Guardian that the trending team were fired without notice in a meeting with a security guard present. They received four weeks’ severance pay.