This is the news Facebook chooses for you to read

Facebook has long characterized itself as a neutral platform that simply connects its users to the rest of the world. But over the past several months, the company faced greatly increased scrutiny, including accusations of bias, over the news it shows its users and where that news comes from. The further takeover of the algorithm was Facebook’s response to all that criticism, something that the company appeared to hope would quell accusations of human bias in its news recommendations. Instead, the early high-profile mistakes of the new trending regime only seemed to highlight how much work it still has to do.

In the first weeks of the new Trending bar, Facebook trended conspiracy theories, old news, fake news — including one story from a site that had “Fakingnews” in its domain name — and was generally slow to pick up on major developing news stories (with the very notable exception of its swift pickup of the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie divorce). We documented a lot of that in our pop-up newsletter on Facebook’s trends. Facebook showed us 31 articles each for Yahoo and USA Today through its trending topics — the top amounts for all of the publications we saw — yet they are both lagging behind in overall engagements for the same period.