Facebook fires trending team, and algorithm without humans goes crazy

Module pushes out false story about Fox's Megyn Kelly, offensive Ann Coulter headline and a story link about a man masturbating with a McDonald's sandwich

• I worked on Facebook's Trending team - the most toxic work experience of my life

Just months after the discovery that Facebook's "trending" news module was curated and tweaked by human beings, the company has eliminated its editors and left the algorithm to do its job. The results, so far, are a disaster.

Facebook announced late Friday that it had eliminated jobs in its trending module, the part of its news division where staff curated popular news for Facebook users. Over the weekend, the fully automated Facebook trending module pushed out a false story about Fox News host Megyn Kelly, a controversial piece about a comedian's four-letter word attack on rightwing pundit Ann Coulter, and links to an article about a video of a man masturbating with a McDonald's chicken sandwich.