Facebook has announced that it will be dropping its ‘Trending’ feature that promotes popular news content on the platform. The change comes as the company is working to refresh and improve its user experience.
Detailed in a press release, Facebook says that its trending feature was only available in select countries and didn’t prove to be popular.
The company says that removing trending will “make way for future news experiences” and that most users are now consuming news and content through video on the platform.
To replace the trending feature Facebook is testing a breaking news label and notifications and a new section on the platform called “Today In:”. There will also be a dedicated news section in Facebook Watch.
- Breaking News Label: A test we’re running with 80 publishers across North America, South America, Europe, India and Australia lets publishers put a “breaking news” indicator on their posts in News Feed. We’re also testing breaking news notifications.
- Today In: We’re testing a dedicated section on Facebook called Today In that connects people to the latest breaking and important news from local publishers in their city, as well as updates from local officials and organizations.
- News Video in Watch: We will soon have a dedicated section on Facebook Watch in the US where people can view live coverage, daily news briefings and weekly deep dives that are exclusive to Watch.
The company also reiterated its goal to stay “committed to ensuring the news that people see on Facebook is high quality”. Back in January, Facebook started asking users to rank news source trustworthiness in an attempt to improve content.
