How does facebook filter news and information, and what are some of these consequences?
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Facebook’s news feed algorithm has been blamed for fanning sectarian hatred, steering users toward extremism and conspiracy theories, and incentivizing politicians to take more divisive stands. It’s in the spotlight thanks to waves of revelations from the Facebook Papers and testimony from whistleblower Frances Haugen, who argues it’s at the core of the company’s problems. Show But how exactly does it work, and what makes it so influential? While the phrase “the algorithm” has taken on sinister, even mythical overtones, it is, at its most basic level, a system that decides a post’s position on the news feed based on predictions about each user’s preferences and tendencies. The details of its design determine what sorts of content thrive on the world’s largest social network, and what types languish — which in turn shapes the posts we all create, and the ways we interact on its platform. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Facebook doesn’t release comprehensive data on the actual proportions of posts in any given user’s feed, or on Facebook as a whole. And each user’s feed is highly personalized to their behaviors. But a combination of internal Facebook documents, publicly available information and conversations with Facebook insiders offers a glimpse into how different approaches to the algorithm can dramatically alter the categories of content that tend to flourish.  Post title Title 23 comments Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment Post title Post title J.B. and 5 others 23 comments Comment Comment The top post on a Facebook user’s news feed, shown as the biggest box, is a prized position based on thousands of data points related to the user and post itself, such as the poster, reactions and comments. As users scroll farther down the feed, the smaller boxes here, the algorithm dictates each post’s position. The algorithm is precisely tailored to each user but also reflects Facebook’s strategy to favor certain content or behavior, illustrated in the following feeds. Since 2018, the algorithm has elevated posts that encourage interaction, such as ones popular with friends. This broadly prioritizes posts by friends and family and viral memes, but also divisive content. This was a departure from Facebook’s previous strategy in the mid-2010s, which optimized for time spent on the site and notably gave greater prominence to clickbait articles and professionally produced videos. Each user’s feed reflects their expressed interests. For a subset of extremely partisan users, today’s algorithm can turn their feeds into echo chambers of divisive content and news, of varying reputability, that support their outlook. Some critics argue a news feed that orders posts from newest to oldest is better for society. This wouldn’t prioritize divisive content, but could give greater space to more frequent low-engagement posters, such as that one distant friend with a new baby. When Facebook launched the News Feed, in 2006, it was pretty simple. It showed a personalized list of activity updates from friends, like “Athalie updated her profile picture” and “James joined the San Francisco, CA network.” Most were automatically generated; there was no such thing as a “post,” just third-person status updates, like “Ezra is feeling fine.” Starting in 2009, a relatively straightforward ranking algorithm determined the order of stories for each user, making sure that the juicy stuff — like the news that a friend was “no longer in a relationship” — appeared near the top. The design of the news feed in 2006. (Facebook/Facebook)Over the past 12 years, almost everything about the news feed algorithm has changed. But the principle of putting the juicy stuff at the top — or at least the stuff most likely to interest a given user — has remained. The algorithm has simply grown ever more sophisticated to the point that today it can take in more than 10,000 different signals to make its predictions about a user’s likelihood of engaging with a single post, according to Jason Hirsch, the company’s head of integrity policy. Yet the news feed ranking system is not a total mystery. Two crucial elements are entirely within the control of Facebook’s human employees, and depend on their ingenuity, their intuition and ultimately their value judgments. Facebook employees decide what data sources the software can draw on in making its predictions. And they decide what its goals should be — that is, what measurable outcomes to maximize for, and the relative importance of each. [How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions] Troves of internal documents have offered new insight into how Facebook makes those critical decisions, and how it thinks about and studies the trade-offs involved. The documents — disclosures made to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress in redacted form by Haugen’s legal counsel — were obtained and reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post. They have focused lawmakers’ attention on Facebook’s algorithm and whether it, and similar recommendation algorithms on other platforms, should be regulated. Defending Facebook’s algorithm, the company’s global affairs chief, Nick Clegg, told ABC’s “This Week” earlier this month that it’s largely a force for good, and that removing algorithmic rankings would result in “more, not less” hate speech and misinformation in people’s feeds. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Story continues below advertisement Advertisement In its early years, Facebook’s algorithm prioritized signals such as likes, clicks and comments to decide which posts to amplify. Publishers, brands and individual users soon learned how to craft posts and headlines designed to induce likes and clicks, giving rise to what came to be known as “clickbait.” By 2013, upstart publishers such as Upworthy and ViralNova were amassing tens of millions of readers with articles designed specifically to game Facebook’s news feed algorithm. Facebook realized that users were growing wary of misleading teaser headlines, and the company recalibrated its algorithm in 2014 and 2015 to downgrade clickbait and focus on new metrics, such as the amount of time a user spent reading a story or watching a video, and incorporating surveys on what content users found most valuable. Around the same time, its executives identified video as a business priority, and used the algorithm to boost “native” videos shared directly to Facebook. By the mid-2010s, the news feed had tilted toward slick, professionally produced content, especially videos that would hold people’s attention. Press Enter to skip to end of carousel Facebook under fireArrowLeft ArrowRight Inside Facebook, Jan. 6 violence fueled anger, regret over missed warning signs How Facebook neglected the rest of the world, fueling hate speech and violence in India The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook’s CEO chose growth over safety Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers What questions do you have about the Facebook Papers? Ask The Post. End of carouselIn 2016, however, Facebook executives grew worried about a decline in “original sharing.” Users were spending so much time passively watching and reading that they weren’t interacting with each other as much. Young people in particular shifted their personal conversations to rivals such as Snapchat that offered more intimacy. Once again, Facebook found its answer in the algorithm: It developed a new set of goal metrics that it called “meaningful social interactions,” designed to show users more posts from friends and family, and fewer from big publishers and brands. In particular, the algorithm began to give outsize weight to posts that sparked lots of comments and replies. The downside of this approach was that the posts that sparked the most comments tended to be the ones that made people angry or offended them, the documents show. Facebook became an angrier, more polarizing place. It didn’t help that, starting in 2017, the algorithm had assigned reaction emoji — including the angry emoji — five times the weight of a simple “like,” according to company documents. [Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation] “The goal of the Meaningful Social Interactions ranking change is in the name: improve people’s experience by prioritizing posts that inspire interactions, particularly conversations, between family and friends,” Facebook spokesman Adam Isserlis said. “We’re continuing to make changes consistent with this goal, like new tests to reduce political content on Facebook based on research and feedback.” “Insofar as problematic content is often more engaging that unproblematic content, ranking-by-engagement runs the risk of favoring the problematic.”While the choices behind Facebook’s news feed algorithm can broadly elevate certain types of content, the same algorithm will produce different results for every user, because it is built to learn from their individual behaviors. If you rarely click on videos in your feed, you’ll be far less likely to see a viral video than your friend who loves videos. If you spend most of your time interacting with Facebook Groups, posts from those groups will figure especially prominently in your feed. [Post Reports: Facebook’s role in the Jan. 6 attack] Internal documents show Facebook researchers found that, for the most politically oriented 1 million American users, nearly 90 percent of the content that Facebook shows them is about politics and social issues. Those groups also received the most misinformation, especially a set of users associated with mostly right-leaning content, who were shown one misinformation post out of every 40, according to a document from June 2020. Story continues below advertisement Advertisement Story continues below advertisement Advertisement One takeaway is that Facebook’s algorithm isn’t a runaway train. The company may not directly control what any given user posts, but by choosing which types of posts will be seen, it sculpts the information landscape according to its business priorities. Some within the company would like to see Facebook use the algorithm to explicitly promote certain values, such as democracy and civil discourse. Others have suggested that it develop and prioritize new metrics that align with users’ values, as with a 2020 experiment in which the algorithm was trained to predict what posts they would find “good for the world” and “bad for the world,” and optimize for the former. Still others, including Haugen, would like to see Facebook’s power over the algorithm taken away altogether: They argue we’d all be better off with social media feeds that simply showed us all of our friends’ posts in reverse-chronological order. But even that would come with trade-offs: The users and institutions that post most frequently, with the largest existing audiences, would dominate our feeds, while worthy ideas and clever videos from those with smaller followings would have less of a chance of reaching people who might be interested. Kate Rabinowitz contributed to this report. Updated October 26, 2021 More coverage: Facebook under fireThe Facebook Papers are a set of internal documents that were provided to Congress in redacted form by Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post. The trove of documents show how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has, at times, contradicted, downplayed or failed to disclose company findings on the impact of its products and platforms. The documents also provided new details of the social media platform’s role in fomenting the storming of the U.S. Capitol. Facebook engineers gave extra value to emoji reactions, including ‘angry,’ pushing more emotional and provocative content into users’ news feeds. Read more from The Post’s investigation: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers How Facebook neglected the rest of the world, fueling hate speech and violence in India How Facebook shapes your feed Show MoreShow Less Read the series: Facebook under fire Read the full series A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers Oct. 26, 2021 Inside Facebook, Jan. 6 violence fueled anger, regret over missed warning signs Oct. 22, 2021 How Facebook shapes your feed Oct. 26, 2021 The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook’s CEO chose growth over safety Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation What happens next? We answer your questions about the Facebook Papers. How Facebook neglected the rest of the world, fueling hate speech and violence in India Frances Haugen took thousands of Facebook documents: This is how she did it View 5 more storiesChevronDownWill OremusFollowTwitter Will Oremus writes about the ideas, products, and power struggles shaping the digital world for The Washington Post. Before joining The Post in 2021, he spent eight years as Slate's senior technology writer and two years as a senior writer for OneZero at Medium.Chris AlcantaraFollowTwitter Chris Alcantara is a graphics reporter at The Washington Post, where he uses code and data to report on business, technology, and politics. He joined The Post in 2016.Jeremy B. MerrillFollowTwitter Jeremy B. Merrill is a data reporter on the technology desk at The Washington Post, gathering and analyzing data to understand how technology, the internet and AI affect business, society and politics.Artur GalochaFollowTwitter Artur Galocha is a graphics reporter focusing on Sports. Before joining The Washington Post in December 2020, he was a graphics editor at El País (Spain).How does Facebook determine what shows up in your News Feed?Posts that you see higher in Feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook. The number of comments, likes and reactions a post receives and what kind of post it is (example: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear higher up in your Feed.
Does Facebook manipulate News Feed?Facebook routinely adjusts its users' news feeds — testing out the number of ads they see or the size of photos that appear — often without their knowledge. It is all for the purpose, the company says, of creating a more alluring and useful product.
What does filter mean on Facebook?The Custom Facebook Feed plugin has a filtering feature built into it which allows you to filter your posts by a specific string, word, or hashtag. You can set this for your feed by going to Facebook Feed > All Feeds > select Edit for the relevant feed > Settings > Filters.
What is the purpose of News Feed on Facebook?News Feed is the first thing people see when they log into Facebook. Its goal is to show people the stories they care about most, every time they visit.
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