Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Social Media
  3. News

Say goodbye to Trending stories on Facebook

By

It may be harder yet to get your news from Facebook. The social media company is continuing its efforts to cut down on the potential for fake news and the possibility of bias and is removing its Trending Topics section next week. “We’re removing Trending soon to make way for future news experiences on Facebook,” Alex Hardiman, head of Facebook News Products, wrote in a blog post. So begin saying your goodbyes now.

The Trending box, which can currently be found on the righthand side of your Facebook homepage, and includes various topics like Politics, Science, and Sports, has been around since 2014. The idea, Hardiman noted, was to “help people discover news topics that were popular across the Facebook community.” That said, Trending was plagued with issues from the start. It was only made available in five countries, and apparently, was responsible for driving less than 1.5 percent of news publishers’ total clicks on average. Moreover, it seems that Facebook users grew increasingly tired of Trending, or perhaps, increasingly wary of its topics. Facebook has long faced criticism over how it decided what stories were actually worthy of the label, and with the rise of fake news on the social network, it comes as little surprise that it’s looking to shut down any potential problem areas.

Recommended Videos

“We will remove Trending from Facebook next week and we will also remove products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the Trends API,” Hardiman wrote. “We’ve seen that the way people consume news on Facebook is changing to be primarily on mobile and increasingly through news video. So we’re exploring new ways to help people stay informed about timely, breaking news that matters to them, while making sure the news they see on Facebook is from trustworthy and quality sources.”

Related

What does that mean for you? Moving forward, you will soon begin seeing a Breaking News Label, which will allow a test group of 80 publishers add a “breaking news” indicator to their Facebook posts. Facebook may also begin sending breaking news notifications. The company is also testing a new section called Today In, which purports to connect “people to the latest breaking and important news from local publishers in their city, as well as updates from local officials and organizations.” Finally, there will be news videos in the Facebook Watch section for folks in the U.S., where you’ll be able to find exclusive live coverage, daily news briefings, and weekly deep dives.

“People tell us they want to stay informed about what is happening around them,” Hardiman concluded. “We are committed to ensuring the news that people see on Facebook is high quality, and we’re investing in ways to better draw attention to breaking news when it matters most.”

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Lulu Chang
Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
Reels are about to show up in yet another Facebook feature
A smartphone with the Facebook app icon on it all on a white marble background.

As its answer to TikTok, Reels is clearly a particularly important priority for Meta. Which is why a number of its platforms' recent feature updates often involve Reels. And today's announcement was not exempt from Meta's push to make Reels just as competitive as TikTok.

On Thursday, Meta announced that it would be bringing Reels to Facebook Groups, mentioning it as one of three new ways for users to "to connect over shared interests." Facebook group members and admins will be able to add "audio, text overlay and filters on top of their videos before sharing to bring their stories to life."

Read more
What is a Facebook Pixel? Meta’s tracking tool, explained
A silhouetted person holds a smartphone displaying the Facebook logo. They are standing in front of a sign showing the Meta logo.

If you have a website for your business and you're wondering how well your ads are reaching prospective customers, you'll probably want to be able to measure that to make sure that the money you've spent on advertising for your business is money well spent. Meta (the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram) offers a tool that can measure that by capturing how your customers interact with your business' website.

At one point, this tool was known as a Facebook Pixel. But since the technology company's recent rebranding to Meta, the tool also underwent a name change and is now known as the Meta Pixel.

Read more
Meta found over 400 mobile apps ‘designed to steal’ Facebook logins
Social media mobile apps on a smartphone screen, all on a textured gray fabric background.

If you frequently use your Facebook login to sign into new mobile apps you've installed, you may want to pay attention to Meta's latest announcement.

On Friday, Facebook's parent company Meta published a blog post written by its Director of Threat Disruption David Agranovich, and Ryan Victory, a Malware Discovery and Detection engineer at Meta. The post detailed Meta's discovery of over 400 mobile apps "that target people across the internet to steal their Facebook login information." Essentially, Meta found hundreds of mobile apps that were "designed to steal"  the login information of Facebook users by having those users log in to these apps with their Facebook login information.

Read more