Facebook’s #Trending comes to an ending

June 5, 2018

As the fake news saga continues, Facebook announced on Friday that it’s removing the Trending section from its site. The tool for discovering trending news stories first launched four years ago and, since then, has grown gradually unpopular and was often criticised for jeopardising the legitimacy of the feed.

In 2016, accusations of bias from right-wing groups led to the an algorithm replacing the human team running the tab, which led to an influx of fake news based off popularity rather than, you know, factual news.

In a statement, the company said:

“We introduced Trending in 2014 as a way to help people discover news topics that were popular across the Facebook community. However, it was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5 percent of clicks to news publishers on average. From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful. We will remove Trending from Facebook next week and we will also remove products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the Trends API.”

But they’re not ditching news altogether. The tech giant is looking at a number of ideas for “future news experiences,” it said. This includes a Breaking News Label that is being tested with 80 publishers across the world, and a “Today In” section that informs people about the latest news from local publishers, along with updates from local officials and organisations. Additionally, Facebook is focusing a lot of attention on its video platform Facebook Watch, with plans to host live coverage, daily news briefings, and weekly news recaps.

Facebook’s reputation on delivering news has undoubtedly been tarnished and it’s going to take some convincing before the social platform becomes the go-to place for headlines. Let’s leave that to Twitter.

Latest Posts

2016 is when social stopped being “posts in a feed” and became a ranked system that decides what gets seen, shared, trusted. In 2026 that same logic sits everywhere, in-platform search, Google snippets, and AI overviews that summarise your brand before anyone clicks. Ofcom says around 30% of UK keyword searches now show AI overviews, and 53% of adults often see AI summaries. The uncomfortable truth is that buyers get a machine-written version of you, then sanity-check it with humans in DMs and group chats. Brands win when their claims are clear, proof is easy to find, and real people show up consistently.

AI is helping B2B organic content rebound on LinkedIn and Reddit, so SEO optimisation for posts has never been more important. We’ve got a playbook to help you get started on boosting that organic visibility on Google and LLMs. First things first – we do often preach here at Immediate…

B2B marketing feels slower because you’re selling to a buying group, not a decision maker. Forrester says the average buying decision involves 13 people and 89% of purchases involve two or more departments. Add three generations with different trust cues and you get rework, internal debate, and “one more version” forever. Buyers are also doing more research without sales, which makes guessing expensive. This LinkedIn Live with Tejal Patel is about buyer behaviour, trust cues, and what social is doing in research and validation, so you can build one narrative that travels across the group and saves your team time.