Trending

Adjective

“widely mentioned or discussed on the Internet, especially on social media websites.”(Dictionary.com)

Facebook’s decision to fire its biased Trending news team and replace it with algorithms has caused a backlash online, after a trending story (see definition above) that is alleged to have been fake managed to trend on Facebook.

The story, from popular conservative site Ending The Fed, claimed that Fox News host Megyn Kelly may be on the way out due to her alleged support of Hillary Clinton versus Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Sites, including the vagina-obsessed, former tech blog Mashable have described the story, which no one has actually proven to be false (it’s scurrilous gossip), as (we’re not making this up) “a worst-case scenario for Facebook.”

Facebook removed the story after it was brought to their attention, telling Business Insider that the story initially met the company’s conditions for the Trending section based on how many people were sharing it on Facebook, but was removed after it was made aware that it was allegedly inaccurate.

The spokesman added that the social networking giant was “working to more accurately detect fake and satirical news stories in the future.”

Seriously?

There’s no need to repeat the dictionary definition of trending again here, but there are many online who need to read it again and then have it explained to them in simpler English, because it’s extraordinarily clear that they have little to no understanding of the word.

Whether the Ending The Fed story was true or not is completely and utterly irrelevant; the only thing relevant here is that it met the definition of trending.

What likely lies beneath the surface with the faux outrage here is really the fact that a story from a conservative site appeared in Facebook’s Trending news feature to begin with.

It’s a sad state of affairs that an article that doesn’t meet the social justice view of the world is nonetheless widely shared and talked about, hounded down with demands that it not be seen.

We are ever more living in an age where speech is stifled.

Orwell’s 1984 could have described the internet in 2016:

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”

Image credit: Paterm/Wikimedia Commons/CC 3.0