Facebook parent company Meta test new ways that allows users to customize their news feed. During the test phase, only a small part of the users will get the new options. Among other things, they can set whether they see more or fewer posts from certain friends, Pages and groups in News Feed.
The goal, according to the Facebook parent company, is for people to “see more of what they want and less of what they don’t want.” In recent years, Facebook has made several changes that would ensure that users would see more messages from friends instead of messages from media and other companies.
Favorites function
Facebook has already had the Favorites function with which up to thirty people can choose whose posts are shown higher in the news feed. Earlier this year, the News Feed also got new filter buttons, which, for example, only shows messages from the favorite people.
Users can also “snooze” certain people, pages or groups, which means that posts from those sources will not appear in their news feed for 30 days.
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Algorithms under attack
In recent years, there has been much criticism of Facebook’s algorithms that determine which posts people see. So would the company have done too little against the spread of fake news, hate messages and other harmful content.
Also leaked recently that for years Facebook has prioritized messages that generated a relatively large number of angry reactions. Posts with more comments (“engagement”) kept users on Facebook longer, allowing the company to earn more through advertising.
Advertisers can exclude themes
Facebook also announced this week that it would allow advertisers to opt-out of their ads appearing next to or near certain topics. It concerns the themes ‘news and politics’, ‘social issues’ and ‘crime and tragedy’. This way, companies can prevent their ad from being close to something they don’t want to be associated with.
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