The Facebook News Feed has been all over the place the last few years. Updates from family and friends slowly disappeared to be replaced by news and features from publishers, which then turned into fake news that resulted in some incredibly strange geopolitical developments. World-altering elections aside, Facebook users haven’t been happy with the News Feed for some time now.
Facebook knows that we want more updates from our personal connections and are working to put more and more of them in our feed. To help explain how Facebook ranks the content and posts that you see in your News Feed, Adam Mosseri who is head of Facebook’s News Feed team published a recent blog post. According to Mosseri, the Nerws Feed ranking system has four elements that it considers:
“…the available inventory of stories; the signals, or data points that can inform ranking decisions; the predictions we make, including how likely we think you are to comment on a story, share with a friend, etc; and a relevancy score for each story.”
To explain how these four elements come together Mosseri put together a video to walk you through how the Facebook News Feed accomplishes its mission to “Connect people with the stories that matter to them most.”
Posted by Facebook on Friday, October 20, 2017
Considering the social and political impact of Facebook, transparency on the News Feed is welcome. It is definitely worth your time to check out the video and bring yourself up to speed with the basic factors determining what you see in your Facebook News Feed. With elections coming up this year on both sides of the Atlantic, we can expect this issue to be a hot topic in the weeks and months ahead.
