The idea to seemingly eliminate the bias of which they have been accused.
Via Fortune:
Who would have thought that a tiny section on Facebook’s homepage would cause so much controversy?
The “Trending” feature, where a few popular news topics are listed on the social network’s homepage, is getting a makeover,Facebook said on Friday. Most notably, Facebook’s hot topics will no longer appear next to descriptions that are written by humans.
Instead, Facebook will show each subject—usually a celebrity’s latest scandal or a current event—next to the number of people discussing it on the service. Human editors will no longer play a role in hand-picking the topics featured other than for verifying quality.
These changes follow a controversy earlier this summer when tech news site Gizmodo published a report alleging that the Facebook’s Trending section was biased against conservative news outlets. According Gizmodo’s report, which cite accounts from anonymous former contract employees who worked on the Trending section, these employees were instructed to ignore topics that conservative users clicked on by keeping them out of the list.