Facebook’s issues’ over what news becomes trend worthy became a national concern during the recent election process, as fake news stories began filling feeds of all its users. While fake stories continue to fill feeds, the issue does not completely stem from Facebook directly but the users as well.

According to Facebook’s Help Center statement, trending stories are chosen based off the amount of publishers posting a story, engagement, and a team that is responsible for what news trends.

The problem with this systematic approach to gathering news trends is it is mainly based off popularity rather than credibility. If the system is reliant on postings and engagement to determine if a story is worthy to trend on feeds, we are relying on numbers more so than any other component.

A story that is popular does hold its own merits, but cannot be the only factor. Clickbait stories for example tend to get heavy engagement and lots of clicks but tend to lack substance and are not always factually true.

According to Facebook they have a team that ensures stories reflect real world events. Does this mean the story must also be true through?

A fake story could be deemed a trending topic because it has real world events and relevancy, but the facts in the story could still be wrong or misleading. During the election an article by snopes.com claimed Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump. While the story would later be discredited, it made its way on to Facebooks trending news and hundreds of thousands of people could have been swayed from this story.

The way to solve this ongoing problem does not rely so much on Facebook figuring out an antidote but relies on the user’s of this platform having better judgement.

Facebook’s users’ are also to blame for this problem, because engagement is based off large quantities of people liking and sharing the same stories. A fake story does not make a news feed because it is Facebook’s own doing, but more so the users not being able to differentiate what is real news or not. Instead of adding to the problem, if users’ can identify a story as fake, they can report the story rather than just giving in to group think and also engaging.

While Facebook flirted with the idea of human editors filtering out bias or fake news, they opted to go with an algorithm that uses mathematics to determine what stories are popular. There is still a team of human editors but their main job is to determine if a story reflects real life events. It is not to determine if the story is in fact true or not.

However, in a reduced role the issue of human editors is still there as the reported firing of Megyn Kelly, a journalist for Fox News, was accepted by editors but was later found out to be a hoax. Online stories began to pop up about the report that Kelly was fired; heavy engagement ensued as many wondered what happened to the prime time anchor of Fox News. Kelly was a debate moderator for the Republican primaries and clashed with Trump over many issues, specifically his thoughts on women.

According to an article excerpt by the Washington Post, Facebook admitted as much in a statement during the Kelly aftermath, when it said the story met the conditions for acceptance at the time because there was a sufficient number of relevant articles.

Based off the algorithm the editors probably just followed protocol as there was relevant articles on the topic, but extensive research or referencing of these said articles could have led to Facebook deeming the prior reports as false. Instead they went with a story based off their algorithm and then had to apologize for their mistake. According to LA Times, Kelly however, is no longer with Fox. She was not fired but rather got offered a position at NBC, which she accepted.

There is no perfect way to end the trending issue. A combination of Facebook’s own flaws and consumers inability to stay correctly informed has created this problem. Overall, Facebook needs to stop clickbait from trending so often and users’ need to learn to stop clicking on it.