Facebook, which had been making a play to be seen as a credible news source, didn’t like being criticized for missing the country’s biggest news story at the time, so it decided to bring in some humans to help curate the news. That’s how the team that Gizmodo profiled in 2016 came to be. In the wake of the allegations, Facebook launched its own investigation, finding “no evidence of systemic bias.” But it didn’t matter: in August, the Trending team was suddenly laid off, and a group of engineers took its place to monitor the performance of the Trending algorithm.45 Within three days, that
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