Facebook is giving you more control over your News Feed.
The social media giant has revealed a new customisation menu for News Feed that allows users to have personalised content that they want see. The News Feed settings menu (which appears in the Facebook apps and on the web) displays which friends appear most often in your News Feed and which friends you’ve chosen to unfollow.
Next, you can choose to unfollow people you don’t want to see anymore or re-follow (or “reconnecting”, according to Facebook jargon) those you’ve previously hidden from your feed.
The new News Feed policy also contains new ways of giving feedback about the types of posts you don’t want to see. Now, instead of choosing to unfollow someone entirely, you can opt to see fewer stories from a friend or page you follow.
This update is a part of a larger effort to make users’ feeds more relevant to what interests them, said Facebook product manager, Greg Marra. There are about 1,500 different stories that can appear in a user’s News Feed, but people only see only 10% of them. The algorithms behind News Feed take into account your previous actions, such as liking photos or clicking on links. The type of device or what type of Internet connection you’re on also contribute great information to Facebook News Feed algorithm.
“We know ranking isn’t perfect … we can’t just look at clicks by themselves as away of telling whether these stories are really interesting,” Marra said, pointing to Facebook’s recent efforts to reduce the amount of clickbait that surfaces in News Feeds. “We’ve been thinking: How do we get at this qualitative angle of what people really want?”
The latest News Feed settings menu is available on Facebook’s apps and website since Friday, while the other customisation features will be released in the coming weeks