The good news is that people are talking and sharing stories about Gurkha on Facebook.
The not so great news, however, is that the Facebook’s algorithm is promoting an old news story of Gurkhas from an unauthentic click-bait website.
Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered trending feature has been in several news stories recently for its flaws of highlighting false stories.
The Trending feature became controversial after Facebook recently fired its journalist team that had been curating and editing the trending topics and the main stories.
Facebook instead is now using AI and its technical staff to maintain the topics and stories in the trending feature.
I am not a super user of the Facebook’s trending feature, but it’s hard to ignore the trending topic when it’s something related to Nepal.
Gurkha – Facebook Trending Topic
Facebook’s trending feature records more than thirty-five thousand people talking about Gurkhas in last 15 hours.
The highlighted news story for Gurkha reports deployment of Royal Gurkha Rifles (2 RGR) to Kabul, Afghanistan in protecting the Nato military.
Having not heard of the news from any other prominent media sources, the story looked downright suspicious. I further checked Google news to see if any other media publishers had reported the story.
Further research of the related stories revealed that the news had been copied from the army-technology.com website that was published back in 12th February 2016.
The Facebook top story shared by thousands also links to a video by AiirSource Military published in January 2015. The video in itself might be noteworthy and interesting to watch and share.
In addition to the above story, other click-bait websites have also taken advantage to share the same news and video after the topic started trending.
Here’s another genuine video of Gurkha that has been shared by thousands in the past 24 hours.
Apart from the flawed Facebook’s feature, I have nothing to complain about the topic itself. It’s a good thing that more and more people are talking about Gurkhas and their heroic works.
All the praise, however, for an old story might not be that relevant! People are wishing Gurkhas all the best for their fight against Taliban in Afghanistan, which is no longer relevant (rather than entirely being a false story).
I hope Facebook’s AI gets smarter and highlights some of the best Gurkha stories shared around in the news feed.
Featured image of The Band of The Brigade of Gurkhas taken by me at Lord’s.