Facebook must kill its trending news feed. Democracy depends on it.

(Update: Facebook announced on June 1 2018 that will eliminate trending news, instead producing its own news videos.)

Facebook built its news feed with the hopes of increasing user engagement by providing food for thought. It worked. But...

Within minutes of the Las Vegas shooting, Facebook and Google’s latest, smartest news feed algorithms got fooled again and massively promoted fake news ahead of real news.

Unwittingly Facebook’s news feed created a set of adverse outcomes that almost certainly could have not been identified before launch. Powerful and essentially unstoppable external forces have hijacked Facebook’s news feed to the point where Facebook should eliminate it for several important reasons.

1. Most troublingly, “trending news” accelerates news in what is what is known a “feed forward” loop: i.e. the more we (and bots and trolls) click on a news item, the more that people will see that item. This reduces visibility of other news, resulting in “groupthink” that shrinks our perspective. Trending news algorithms can be adjusted but will always create “observational bias” in that we react most to what we see most.
2. News feeds will always be vulnerable to hacking via bots and trolls controlled by governments, lobbyists, or corporations seeking to further their interests. Powerful combinations of fake news such as on the Las Vegas massacre, and “click hyping” to artificially pump the article up the news feed drowns out real news that individuals choose to post and isn’t hyped by bots.

Changing news selection algorithms can never outrun these powerful (sometimes state sponsored) robotic attacks, resulting in an un-winnable game of Whack-A-Mole for Facebook.

Election results including the US presidency and Brexit have been already been influenced by fake news targeted to individual FB accounts by foreign governments and others using sophisticated tools such as Cambridge Analytica (which claims to hold over 5,000 data points of 220 million Americans).

3. News feeds makes us dumb because we get spoon-fed articles that an algorithm put in front of us. The answer to this is not menus of news preferences which narrow our view by definition, it is people finding news themselves from diverse sources, as we used to do. This makes for a more diverse and better informed Facebook.

4. Presere the diversity of news sources. News outlets are already reeling from loss of subscription revenues. Now articles are being cherry-picked by trending algorithms that create winners and losers, not by the merit of the news source itself.

For these reasons (and likely more) Facebook should eliminate its news feed. I do not believe that this will meaningfully change usage. I DO believe this will benefit Facebook by bringing it back to more of a community sharing platform.

Mr. Zuckerberg has built the world’s de-facto sharing platform and, as a “natural monopoly” (one where everyone benefits as more people participate), it is unlikely to be challenged for the foreseeable future.

As Winston Churchill and FDR both observed: with great power, comes great responsibility. Mr. Zuckerberg, you are now in that league no matter how unwittingly it occurred. You are a powerful learner and I have no doubt you’ll rise to the challenge — however sometimes the answer is doing less, not more.