Who says algorithms are the only possible determinants of something which is trending?<p>The article specifically points out that human editors were introduced after Facebook failed to surface Ferguson protests—making it look bad because those protests <i>were</i> in fact trending on Twitter. Moreover, some theoretical perfect algorithm <i>could</i> have asserted that was a trending topic.<p>In fact, there is not perfect algorithm for determining what is &quot;trending.&quot; Part of hiring human curators is to train an algorithm which can more effectively use judgement in figuring out topics which are truly trending&#x2F;newsworthy&#x2F;interesting instead of coincidentally used a lot without being valuable (ex. #FollowFriday).<p>Moreover, it seems clear that injecting stories is actually relatively rare. The <i>primary</i> reason to have human curators is to do filtering to prevent the junk from showing up in trending.