Facebook's news saga reminds us humans are biased by design

The revelation that some of the social media site's journalistic decisions are made by people, not algorithms, has shone a fascinating light on the rapidly changing news landscape

On Thursday, Facebook finally admitted what many had suspected for years: its "trending topics" feature, a small box that lives on the top right of its website, is edited by journalists, relying as much on their news sense and good old-fashioned editorial guidelines as on Facebook's own technological solutions to the problem of finding "trending" stories.

The journalists involved in curating Facebook's trending topics feature have reportedly spent much of their two years on the job forced into silence by strict non-disclosure agreements preventing them from even revealing that they worked at the company. But a report from US technology site Gizmodo this month began a process that would eventually see the social network admit that Facebook was more than a mere platform.