Facebook will change what you see in your News Feed again

a dead, the parent company of Facebook social networking siteIt is testing new ways for users to personalize the content they see in their news channels, he said.

The company said in a blog post on Thursday that the test, which is available to a “small percentage” of users, will allow people to adjust their preferences to increase or decrease the amount of content they see from specific friends, family, groups and pages. They are on the platform.

Facebook has tweaked the way its News Feed delivers content countless times over the past few years and seems to be constantly rethinking which content to prioritize and why.

In 2015, she said she was changing the News Feed to favor content from close friends over brands and services. In 2016, Facebook again said it would modify its algorithm so that friends’ posts would have priority over publishers.

Then, in 2018, the company said it was changing the News Feed so that posts that could generate “interactive discussions” (aka engagement, which are Facebook’s bread and butter) are more likely to appear than passive content.

Guess what Facebook did in 2020? Well, a few things, but it also tweaked the news feed again, this time to favor more reliable and quality news sources. He retracted that “cooler” version of the news feed in December 2020, much to the disgust of some Facebook employees.

How the social media giant controls the news feed has been a big mystery, but Facebook released a report in September that said it would give the public some ideas on how to decide what content to hide or “downgrade” — such as clickbait and posts by those who frequently break its rules. .

Test

In the new test, users will be able to reduce the size of friends, family, Pages and groups in their News Feed if they prefer. Meta said in the blog post that this was “part of our ongoing work to give people more control over their News Feed so they see more of what they want and less of what they don’t.”

Facebook will also make changes to its news controls for its corporate customers, expanding “topic exclusion” controls for a test group of advertisers serving English-language ads.

Advertisers can choose from three thematic groups – news and politics, social issues, crime and tragedies – so they can prevent their ads from appearing next to posts on those topics, if they wish.