Digital Buzz – The Facebook Trending Fail that went viral. Sometimes it’s better to hire humans!

It can be difficult to keep up with all of the technological advances happening in our world – there’s always so much going on! As part of our weekly blog, SponsoredLinX take a look at some of the biggest social media news announcements to have caught our eye during August. 

Facebook replaces its Trending News Team staff with algorithms, and the results are bad – very bad!  

Facebook have just proven what we’ve always known – sometimes there’s no replacement for a real human staff member. After announcing last Friday that they were going to be replacing many of their ‘trending news module’ staff with an algorithm, Facebook found that things…well…didn’t go as they’d planned. Funny that!

Over the weekend, the algorithm pushed out a story on Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly, stating that she had been fired for supporting Hillary Clinton. Titled “BREAKING: Fox News exposes traitor Megyn Kelly, kicks her out for backing Hillary,” the article was in fact completely false and had been published by an unreputable source.

With Facebook’s trending team stripped of real humans, and left in the hands of algorithms, the fact-checking that would usually have been completed by staff was skipped; resulting in false allegations sitting in Facebook’s trending column for hours and being shared over and over.

Other failings over the weekend included a ‘trending’ article on author Ann Coulter being called a racist (and a horrible four-letter word), and a man doing things to a McChicken burger that should never have seen the light of day.

What does this prove? Sometimes, it’s best to pay humans to actually do the work!

Read more here.

YouTube Ratings found to be inaccurate for the last 18 months

It came as a bit of a shock to hear this one – but apparently Nielsen have been under-reporting their YouTube desktop ratings (in their Online Ratings) by up to half, over the last 18 months!

Given that marketing agencies and advertisers have been basing their decisions and research on incorrect figures since January 2015, this revelation is a real concern. However, the inaccuracies are said to have only affected Nielsen’s Hybrid Streaming ratings – as opposed to their monthly Digital Ratings.

According to AdNews, as of the 27th August all YouTube data reported is now correct.

To read more about the issue, click here.

Would you accept a ride from just ‘anyone’? Google Waze wants you to!

Is it just me, or is this the sort of thing our parents always advised us against?! Call me paranoid, but the idea of Google Waze allowing anyone to be a rideshare driver – without background checks – just doesn’t sound sensible to me. Sure, it may be a cheaper option to Uber and Lyft (reportedly, rates in San Francisco will start at 54 cents per litre), but is it really worth it?

As reported by The Next Web:

A troublesome part of this report is that Google has no plans to do background checks. Uber has come under fire for its own background checks (or lack thereof), but Google will let riders filter out bad actors via reviews. Still, the entire concept seems a bit too head-in-the-clouds. We’ve seen Uber drivers do some terrible stuff, and that’s with background checks in place.”

The carpooling service is currently open to any San Francisco driver, but at present, only employees from a select number of large technology companies can sign up as riders.

I guess we’ll have to wait to see the results!

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