A fake Megyn Kelly story about her being fired at Fox News was flying high on Facebook early Monday – two days after the social media giant announced changes in how such trending topics were being selected.
The bogus article, headlined: "BREAKING: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out for Backing Hillary," disappeared from Facebook's Trending Topics on Monday morning after running as one of the top stories for hours, said The Verge.
"The story is far down the rabbit hole of junk information, a typo-ridden aggregation of an aggregation about a clash of personalities between Kelly and Bill O'Reilly," said Washington Post writer Abby Ohlheiser.
The fake report suggested that Kelly, host of the "The Kelly File," one of Fox News' top-rated talk shows, was about to be replaced for wanting Hillary Clinton to win November's presidential election, said The Verge.
On Friday, Facebook announced changes in how its top Trending Topics articles would be selected "algorithmically, based on a high volume of mentions and a sharp increase in mentions over a short period of time."
Gizmodo charged in May that Facebook's team of human "news curators" artificially skewed the popularity of stories in the Trending Topics section to downplay politically conservative stories.
The website Quartz reported on Friday that Facebook had laid off Trending Topics editorial staff and replaced them with engineers, who now check that the articles that surfaced by the algorithms are newsworthy.
"Our goal is to enable Trending for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied solely on summarizing topics by hand," Facebook said on its blog Friday. "A more algorithmically driven process allows us to scale Trending to cover more topics and make it available to more people globally over time."
The Verge said it approached Facebook for comment about the Kelly story but did not receive an answer.
Thoughts on the fake stories on Facebook varied on social media.
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