News Digest

Here’s some news: Facebook is changing what posts you see first… again

Facebook is overhauling the way its News Feed algorithm works to encourage more user activity on the social network. It will change which posts you see first in your feed, and weed out the posts Facebook thinks you’d rather not look at. Instead of pushing content to the top of your feed based on how many people have interacted with it, it’s going to use feedback from users to decide. A blog post by Facebook said: “News Feed will begin to look at both the probability that you would want to see the story at the top of your feed and the probability that you will like, comment on, click or share a story.”

We will rank stories higher in feed which we think people might take action on, and which people might want to see near the top of their News Feed.

Facebook post

Some content creators currently ask users to like and comment on their stories to ensure that they rise up people’s feeds. But the change means that this could actually reduce their visibility in future. The post said: “This will likely only cause temporary spikes in metrics that might then be rebalanced by feed’s ranking over time.”