Facebook is officially ending their trending news section, reports Business Insider. If you’re someone who mostly goes on Facebook using your phone, you probably have no idea what the trending news section is. That’s because it’s only shown on a desktop version of Facebook where it lives on the right side of the homepage. It looks like this.
According to Alex Hardiman, Facebook’s head of news products, “From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful,” saying that the section only accounted for about 1.5% of clicks to news publishers.
The trending news section was brought about in 2014 and has been pretty controversial ever since. Originally, the trending news section was run by human Facebook employees. In 2016, Gizmodo reported that the employees “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers” from the section.
After firing the workers and letting an algorithm run the trending news section, the Washington Post found that many stories being pushed daily were fake and extremely inaccurate. They also found that “On top of that, news releases, blog posts from sites such as Medium and links to online stores such as iTunes regularly trended.”
The trending news section seems to be nothing if not annoying and useless. Hardiman also stated that Facebook is making way “for future news experiences on Facebook.” We’re looking forward to what the feature will be and hopefully it’ll be more accurate than what we’ve seen previously.