Facebook has fired all members of its Trending news team and has replaced moderation with an algorithm following allegations of systematic political bias first raised in May.

According to Quartz, 15-18 workers were shown the door, and supervision over the news will now go to engineers who, unlike those they replaced, will not be interfering in what stories are listed but will keep an eye on it to make sure items are actually newsworthy.

The social networking giant spun the decision in an announcement post saying that the move was to enable “Trending” (the name of the trending news feature) “for as many people as possible, which would be hard to do if we relied solely on summarizing topics by hand.”

With the changes, the most noticeable difference in Trending will be the abolition of a manually written story descriptions, which will now simply reflect the topic being discussed, with examples given including #PhelpsFace or NASA, along with the number of people talking about that particular topic on Facebook.

Users requiring more information about the trending news are able to hover over the listed item to be shown a headline and summary of an article pulled from a publish directly; search results include various sources covering the news item, Facebook posts discussing it based solely on an algorithm that considers the volume of mentions of for each item.

Interestingly, although not clearly spelled out by Facebook, is a suggestion that a users’ Trending experience may be individualized, with the company saying “like much of the content you see across Facebook, the list of topics you see is still personalized based on a number of factors, including Pages you’ve liked, your location (e.g., home state sports news), the previous trending topics with which you’ve interacted, and what is trending across Facebook overall,” in theory meaning that everyone could have their own trending list.

Good

Facebook’s decision to remove its Trending editor team, which was not only exposed as manipulating Trending items in May but further exposed to consist primarily of people who would be more commonly referred to as social justice warriors in July, is a good step by Facebook and will go some way in restoring faith in the concept that the social networking giant actually operates in an unbiased fashion.

That said, Facebook continues to delete and censor views some of its employees do not agree with, particularly those that are right of center. Perhaps going forward Facebook could turn to technology in how it deals with moderating content on its pages as it now has with its Trending list.

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