Facebook wants your help to improve the News Feed
People have expressed a desire to see less political and more uplifting content.
- Named a Tech Media Trailblazer by the Consumer Technology Association in 2019, a winner of SPJ NorCal's Excellence in Journalism Awards in 2022 and has three times been a finalist in the LA Press Club's National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards.
What's on your mind?
Facebook is looking to improve users' experience with News Feed, the social network said in a Thursday blog post. Over the next few months, the company will gather more specific feedback from people about the posts they see and then use that to improve how content is displayed.
One of the ways Facebook is doing this is by running global tests to survey people and understand which posts are inspirational -- something the company says people want to see more of on their feed. The goal is to then display more of this content near the top of News Feed.
The social network will also ask people whether they want to see more or fewer posts about specific topics. It'll use that collective feedback to show more content about topics people are actually interested in.
"Even though your News Feed contains posts from the friends, Groups and Pages you've chosen to follow, we know sometimes even your closest friends and family share posts about topics that aren't really interesting to you, or that you don't want to see," the blog post reads.
Facebook also says it's getting more feedback from people that there's too much political content surfacing on News Feed, as well as "other kinds of posts and comments that detract from their News Feed experience. This is a sensitive area, so over the next few months, we'll work to better understand what kinds of content are linked with these negative experiences." For instance, the company will look at posts with a large number of angry reactions and ask what sorts of posts people want to see less of.
Lastly, the company is testing a new design that lets users tap an X in the upper right corner of a post to hide it from News Feed and see fewer posts like it going forward.
"While engagement will continue to be one of many types of signals we use to rank posts in News Feed, we believe these additional insights can provide a more complete picture of the content people find valuable, and we'll share more as we learn from these tests," Facebook said.