14 DAY TRIAL // If you sometimes have the feeling that your feed is unvarying and constant, and you blame Facebook's numerous filters for this, researchers have carried out a study to prove you wrong.
Facebook made it clear from the very beginning that the main aim of the news feed is "to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time, so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them."
Since its launch, the News Feed has gone through some visible changes, but it’s the most recent one that seems not to have been very well received by some users.
A while back, Facebook announced that it had implemented a News Feed algorithm which was supposed to filter the results on a user’s page based on his preferences and needs.
In other words, if Facebook noticed that you were particularly keen on interacting with a certain friend, it would have pushed more notifications and updates from that particular friend in your feed. Or, if your Facebook history showed that you are mainly interested in a certain topic, say cars, then, in all likelihood, you would have seen more car posts.
More recent changes took this even further. Focused on providing users with the content they would like to see, Facebook announced that its algorithm would now make sure that they won’t be missing out any important updates from their friends and that they would see less of irrelevant post that are of little interest to them.
Users think that Facebook makes the choices for them
However, these changes seem to have affected some users’ feeds in a rather unexpected way by considerably diminishing the amount of content they receive, which led them to think that Facebook might be bypassing certain content.
Published in the Science Magazine, a study conducted by Facebook researchers shows that it’s not the social website’s fault for the amount and the type of content we get to see every day. It’s the people who we befriend on Facebook that have a large influence on the news that are made available in our feed.
So, it’s not Facebook that is cutting down your news content, but your choice of virtual friends. For instance, if the great majority of your friends’ political beliefs are liberal, then you are very likely to receive news about liberals. In other words, it’s all because of your friends and not because Facebook is trying to conduct some secret political campaign.