It wouldn't. Not for end users anyways. It would be a marketer's dream.
If you feel like that's the way things should be, write one. Make it popular. Sell it to Facebook. (And use the money to buy stock in your roommate's new online marketing firm)
Children believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Is it shocking that they're wrong?
Trending implies humanity cares about it, which to the lowly average-joe means humanity cares about it, so s/he should too. This is the part that feels disingenuous on Facebook's part.
Of course even average-joe knows (though probably can't express) that everything around him just wants to consume his attention, so I'm also not overly concerned about it.
"The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program." [1]
I doubt Facebook marketers have the same kind of standards.
That's true. The issue here isn't that Facebook tried and failed to implement an automatically generated news feed. The issue is they were called out for bias in the news feed, and then tried to deflect by blaming it on a computer.