A Goal, parent company of Facebook, said it is testing new ways for users to personalize the content they see in their newsfeeds.
The company said in a blog post on Thursday that the test, available to a "small percentage" of users, would allow people to adjust their preferences. preferences to increase or decrease the amount of content they see from specific friends, family, groups, and pages they are connected to on the platform.
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Facebook has tweaked the way the News Feed presents content numerous times over the last few years and seems to be always rethinking what content should be prioritized and why.
In 2015, she said she was changing News Feeds to favor content from close friends over brands and services. In 2016, Facebook again said it would adjust its algorithm so that posts from friends take priority over publishers.
Then, in 2018, the company said it was changing News Feed so posts that could generate “interactive discussions” (aka engagement, which is Facebook's bread and butter) would be more likely to show up than more passive.
Guess what Facebook did in 2020? Well, a few things, but it also tweaked News Feed yet again, this time to favor more reliable and quality news sources. It rolled back that “cooler” version of News Feed in December 2020, much to the reported chagrin of some Facebook employees.
How the social media giant controls its News Feed has been a big mystery, but Facebook released a report in September that said it would give the public some insights into how they decide what content they suppress, or “demote” – such as clickbait and posts by those who repeatedly violate their rules.
Users in the new test will be able to turn down the volume of friends, family, Pages and groups in their News Feeds if they choose. Meta said in the blog post that this was "part of our ongoing work to give people more control over the News Feed so they see more of what they want and less of what they don't."
Facebook will also make changes to news controls for its enterprise customers, expanding the “topic exclusion” controls for a test group of advertisers running ads in English.
Advertisers can select from three topic groups – news and politics, social issues, crime and tragedy – so they can prevent their ads from appearing near posts about these topics, if prefer.