How Facebook’s trending news feature went from messy to disastrous. (Slate)

Later in the article: "In this case, it seems, Facebook cared more about keeping its nose clean than about serving its users. And it was willing to ship an inferior product to prove it." Also see Facebook should hire fact-checkers. Here’s what they would do (Poynter)

"The results were not pretty. “They were running these tests with subsets of users, and the feedback they got internally was overwhelmingly negative. People would say, ‘I don’t understand why I’m looking at this. I don’t see the context anymore.’ There were spelling mistakes in the headlines. And the number of people talking about a topic would just be wildly off.” The negative feedback came from both Facebook employees participating in internal tests and external Facebook users randomly selected for small public tests.

The contractor assumed Facebook’s engineers and product managers would go back to the drawing board. Instead, on Friday, the company dumped the journalists and released the new, poorly reviewed version of trending news to the public."

How Facebook’s trending news feature went from messy to disastrous.