Next week, Facebook is pulling the plug on its Trending feature, which it introduced in January 2014.
In a Newsroom post announcing the move, head of news products Alex Hardiman revealed that Trending was only available in five countries—the U.S., U.K., Canada, India and Australia—and it accounted for fewer than 1.5 percent of clicks to news publishers.
Saying that research conducted by Facebook indicated that users didn’t find its Trending feature to be “very useful or valuable,” Hardiman announced that Trending will be remove from Facebook next week, as will products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the social network’s Trends API (application-programming interface).
In August 2016, Facebook removed descriptions from its Trending topics, enabling them to be completely populated by algorithms (albeit with some human oversight), but this process came under fire later that month when a fake news story about then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly was elevated to the top spot.
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