title:  Facebook’s Bad Week Of ‘Trending News’ Ends With The Most Tone-Deaf 9/11 Topic Imaginable
text: Today s a somber day of remembrance for the lives lost 15 years ago in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, United Flight 93, and all the sacrifices made since then. Social media has been tracking 9/11 topics for the last several days, as they should, but two days ago, Facebook also decided to feature a story that s nothing but a truther conspiracy in its  trending topics  sidebar.9/11 truthers are conspiracy theorists loudly proclaiming that the attacks were an inside job. This particular story was from a U.K. tabloid site called The Daily Star, and it says (because of course it does): Engineers Steven Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti and Ted Walter are part of the growing community of experts who say evidence indicates the towers were brought down in a controlled demolition.They wrote a paper for Europhysics News highlighting four important pieces of evidence pointing to this conclusion.These were: fires are not normally hot enough to heat a massive steel structure enough for it to collapse; the majority of high rise buildings have sprinkler systems that prevent a fire from getting hot enough to heat steel to a critical level; skyskrapers (sic) are protected using flame-proof materials and they are also designed so that if compromised, they do not collapse. Spelling errors aside, there is actually a wealth of evidence showing that the Twin Towers did not have adequate fireproofing on their superstructures. Not to mention that these four engineers are well-known truthers immune to actual science and fact. They re  experts,  though, and must be taken seriously. Not.But that s beside the point.Facebook recently got rid of all its trained journalists for its  trending  section. Zuckerberg said that the change was because they re a platform, not a content creator (the truth probably has more to do with money than that, but Facebook won t admit it). Yet, the result has been awful. A false story about Megyn Kelly. A man using a McChicken sandwich for sexual pleasure. A satire piece about Siri coming out of the iPhone 8 and cooking. BreitAnd now, an impossibly disrespectful story about the alleged truth of the 9/11 attacks. That trivializes everyone who died, everyone who worked rescue, everyone who s sick from working rescue, everyone who lost family members, our military men and women who died in Afghanistan trying to find Osama bin Laden and take down the Taliban, and the experiences of the entire country during and following that tragic day.While it s true that trending topics will include topics and stories we disagree with, for this to be one of the top trending stories just prior to the 15th anniversary of those attacks shows just how clueless, cold and insensitive Facebook has become without its real, bona fide journalists to determine trending topics.It seems that Facebook s decision to automate, automate, automate was one of the worst ideas in the long, sad history of bad ideas. Fortunately, this story was removed from their trending topics list, but the Internet never forgets.Featured image by Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images