“'We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,' said one former curator. 'If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.' Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed 'trending' by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook has struggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. 'We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,' one former curator said.”

Annotation

Facebook has recently come under fire as a result of reporting that indicates that Facebook curators exercised political bias in what news items appear on Facebook's trending feed. Additionally, news items not trending on Facebook were sometimes bumped to the top despite Facebook users not showing enough interest in them for them to trend. 

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