The dismissal of the trending module team appears to have been a long-term plan at Facebook.
In May, the Guardian published the guidelines used by Facebook's Trending module team after Gizmodo revealed that the module was in fact curated by humans.
A source told the Guardian the trending module was meant to have "learned" from the human editors' curation decisions and was always meant to eventually reach full automation.
Facebook announced late Friday that it had eliminated jobs in its trending module, the part of its news division where staff curated popular news for Facebook users.
Facebook has been criticized for the way it handles political discussion, first for obscuring the way human editors managed its Trending module, and then for the way its subsequent algorithm-only curation has promoted fake stories.
Specifically, complaints about the absence from trending feeds of news reports about clashes between protesters and police in Ferguson in 2014 were evidence to Facebook that – in the specific case of the trending module – humans had better news judgment than the company's algorithm.
Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a false story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a controversial piece about a comedian's four-letter word attack on rightwing pundit Ann Coulter, and links to an article about a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald's chicken sandwich.
Facebook dedicates a prime spot on its desktop site for the trending module and recently fired all the human editors in favor of an algorithm that apparently judges the honeymoon photos of a reality TV couple to be more editorially valuable than news on Donald Trump.
But the documents show that the company relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team to determine what makes its "trending module" headlines – the list of news topics that shows up on the side of the browser window on Facebook's desktop version.
Facebook will be adding more information to the trending module itself, including specific publisher headlines.
