Oke News- A massive social media protest is exploding on Facebook, not Twitter for a change, yet Facebook’s dehumanized Trending system wasn’t picking it up. People around the country are checking in on Facebook at the Standing Rock Native American Reservation in an effort to supposedly hinder local Morton County police from targeting protesters attending in person to fight an oil pipeline through historic tribal lands.The Morton County’s sheriff has denied using Facebook for surveillance. Still, the social media protest has proceeded to bring concerns about the environmental and cultural impact of the pipeline to national attention. While some users have taken to masking their posts, explaining their absentee check-ins by using incorrect spellings like “Randing Rock,” there’s still more chatter about the exact term than many other Facebook Trends.
Even if Facebook showed related Trends in past weeks, or was trying to suppress the spread of the check-in story since police may not be doing surveillance on protesters with geotargeting, it’s still a huge topic of conversation. Including a Trend highlighting a story that discusses the surveillance denial by the sheriff or why people are checking in could have provided important context for users.
Standing Rock wasn’t a Trend despite Facebook’s own search tool showing “Standing Rock Indian Reservation” was a popular search, with more than 86,000 people talking about it. But you’d only know that if you searched for it. Standing Rock and related terms have much more chatter than other topics Facebook was showing as Trending, such as actor Bryan Cranston saying he’ll move to Canada if Trump is elected.
Since Facebook removed its human curators, it switched the Trends design to remove the immediately visible descriptions of the trends and now only shows the trending term itself, in this case #NoDAPL. Since there’s no way to guess what that terms mean, only users who click on the Trend or hover over it to see the related news link would learn about the pipeline protest.
Read more on site https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/broken-pipeline/