Facebook to use your feedback to rank content in News Feed

Over the next few months, we'll test new ways to get more specific feedback from people about the posts they're seeing, and we'll use that feedback to make News Feed better," said Aastha Gupta

San Francisco: Facebook has announced to incorporate more feedback into its News Feed ranking and starting this spring, the social network is expanding its work to use direct feedback from people who use its platform to understand the content people find most valuable.

Facebook said it will continue to incorporate this feedback into its News Feed ranking process.

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“Over the next few months, we’ll test new ways to get more specific feedback from people about the posts they’re seeing, and we’ll use that feedback to make News Feed better,” said Aastha Gupta, Product Management Director.

People have told Facebook they want to see more inspiring and uplifting content in News Feed because it motivates them and can be useful to them outside of Facebook.

“We’re running a series of global tests that will survey people to understand which posts they find inspirational. We’ll incorporate their responses as a signal in News Feed ranking, with the goal of showing people more inspirational posts closer to the top of their News Feed,” Gupta said in a statement on Thursday.

Facebook said that it will ask people whether they want to see more or fewer posts about a certain topic.

Based on their collective feedback, it will aim to show people more content about the topics they’re more interested in, and show them fewer posts about topics they don’t want to see.

“Increasingly, we’re hearing feedback from people that they’re seeing too much content about politics and too many other kinds of posts and comments that detract from their News Feed experience,” said Gupta.

To address this, over the next few months, Facebook said it work to better understand what kinds of content are linked with these negative experiences. “For example, we’ll look at posts with lots of angry reactions and ask people what kinds of posts they may want to see less of”.

In 2019, Facebook first introduced surveys to ask people, “Is this post worth your time?”

Now, the company is building on such surveys by asking new questions about the content people find valuable as well as the content people don’t enjoy seeing in their News Feed.