Some Brief Notes on What Journalists See in Trending on Facebook’s Signal

So I have access to Facebook’s dashboard for Journalists: “Signal”. Facebook needs to approve access for Signal and it seems you need to work at a media organization to use it.

With all the discussion around Facebook’s Trending I thought it would be interesting to talk about what is visible inside of Signal for Trending.

Signal has Trending and Emerging tabs as part of its Trending section.

I’m not going to go into detail about the Emerging section right now, but I’ve played with it in the past and I’ve spotted topics that would move from Emerging to Trending as far as 8 hours in advance.

When writing this there were 187 Trending Topics listed in Signal.

I’ve noted in the past that Trending has categories.

Looking at Trending Now in Signal, the categories I’ve seen seem to match up to the documents released by Facebook.

You can also sort by time.

Here are the latest active Trending Topics around 5:00pm today (May, 12, 2016) in New York City:

And here are the oldest Trends, which go back as far as 2 days ago:

Presumably Signal shows all the Trending Topics on the system and is not limited by geography, but Signal doesn’t make expressly that clear.