It certainly doesn't help that around mid-2016 Facebook did away with their hand-curated Trending Topics feature and attempted to machine-learn trending topics.

It certainly doesn't help that around mid-2016 Facebook did away with their hand-curated Trending Topics feature and attempted to machine-learn trending topics. The new machine-learning approach was very susceptible to botnets spreading fake-news sites in a way that the old hand-curated topics were not, and this was exploited with botnets/etc. It was an extraordinarily bad time to test this feature in production with the Russian meddling that was taking place. But conservatives were whining that the "Trending News" section had a liberal bias, so it had to go. https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-undercut-by-fear-1788808204 https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-un...