In firing human editors, Facebook has lost the fight against fake news

It took only two days for an algorithm to highlight a fake story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. Facebook's influence on news dissemination makes such mistakes arguably irresponsible

Two days after Facebook announced it was replacing the humans that write the Trending Topics descriptions with robots, a fake article about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly appeared in its list of trending stories.

On Friday, Facebook announced that in a bid to reduce bias it would make the Trending feature more automated and laid off up to 26 contractors hired to write and edit the short descriptions that accompanied each trend. On Sunday a story headlined "Breaking: Fox News Exposes Traitor Megyn Kelly, Kicks Her Out for Backing Hillary" found its way into the list of trending stories - despite the fact that it's not true.