News Feed is a feature of the social network Facebook. The web feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. Using a proprietary method, Facebook selects a handful of updates to show users every time they visit their feed, out of an average of 2,000 updates they can potentially receive.
Over two billion people use Facebook every month, making the network's News Feed the most viewed and most influential aspect of the news industry.
Video News Feed
History
Before 2006, Facebook simply consisted of profiles, requiring the user to visit a profile to see any new posts. On September 6, 2006, Facebook announced a new home page feature called "News Feed". The new layout created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activities. Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused discontent among Facebook users, many of which complained that the feed was too intrusive, detailing every moment with timestamps, and violated their privacy. Some called for a boycott of the company. In response to this dissatisfaction, CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement clarifying that "We didn't take away any privacy options", and later issued an open letter apologizing for a lack of information on new features and users' controls, writing "We really messed this one up. [...] I'd like to try to correct those errors now."
The News Feed has received multiple updates over the years since its original setup. In 2008, Facebook added a feedback button to each story in a user's feed, letting them tell the service about their personal preferences for their feed. However, the feedback button was removed in April, and returned in July, with Facebook reportedly removing the first iteration of the feedback options due to a low impact on user satisfaction compared to other aspects of the algorithm.
In March 2009, Facebook rolled out the option to "Like" a page to see updates from it in their feed, gave users customizable filters to determine what friends they wanted to see News Feed updates from, and also added a publishing field at the top of the feed, previously exclusive to user profiles, for easy post creation. The publishing field contained the text "What's on your mind?", a similar but also notably different question from Twitter's "What are you doing right now?" A few weeks later, the company introduced controls to reduce content from app interactions, and enabled the feed to show photos in which friends were tagged.
In December 2010, Facebook rolled out a new drop-down button, offering users the ability to view News Feed by categories, including only games, status updates, photos, links, Pages, or specific groups of people.
In February 2011, Facebook added News Feed settings to let users specify if they want content from only the people and pages they interact with the most, rather than everyone. In September, Facebook updated the feed to show top stories and most recent stories, rather than relying on a strictly chronological order. Later the same year, it introduced the "ticker", a real-time extension of News Feed, located on the right side of the screen. At the end of the year, news outlets reported that Facebook would starting allowing advertisements through "Sponsored Stories" in News Feed for the first time. Advertisements started rolling out on January 10, 2012, with a "Featured" tag declaring its paid status. Advertisements were expanded to mobile in February 2012.
In March 2013, Facebook held a press event to unveil new updates to News Feed, including a more minimalistic design with consistency across both the website and mobile devices, along with a new layout for posts, presenting friends' photos, shared articles, and maps with larger text and images, and brands' logos. New "sub-feeds" show updates in specific areas, such as posts from specific friends or interest updates. However, the initial limited rollout of the new design saw a trend of lower user engagement, prompting the company to stop the rollout. A year later, in March 2014, Facebook once again updated its News Feed, but in response to criticism from users, the company chose to scale back its efforts. While bringing bigger photos that span the width of the feed, font changes, and design tweaks to buttons and icons, the new design removed the drop-down menu, placing relevant entries in a navigation on the left side of the screen while removing some of the sub-feeds. It also simplified the comments system, altered the appearance of profile photos in the feed, and added a search bar at the top of the page. News Feed product manager Greg Marra explained that "People don't like us moving their furniture around, because you break muscle memory", and "Over the last year, we've spent a lot of time seeing what people were saying, what was working, what wasn't working, and we're rolling out the version that takes all of that feedback into account".
In January 2018, Facebook announced significant changes to the News Feed, reconfiguring its algorithms to prioritize content from family members and friends over that of companies, outside media sites, or other public content. The shift is to improve the amount of meaningful content viewed. The company will also begin giving priority to news articles from sources considered more credible, based on surveys of Facebook users.
Maps News Feed
Influence
Two billion people use Facebook every month, making the network's News Feed the most viewed and most influential aspect of the news industry. Facebook's influence has become a liability for the company, as propagandists used it to viralize fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The news feed has become a significant contributor to the spread of misinformation; as former U.S. president Barack Obama put it, "misinformation...looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television."
After the 2016 election, journalist Margaret Sullivan called on facebook to hire an editor to monitor News Feed to ensure accuracy and balance of news stories. In late 2016, Facebook described plans to issue warning labels on certain News Feed posts. Facebook has a partnership with fact-checkers like Snopes.com and PolitiFact, and would display that a story is disputed if it has been debunked by one of those fact-checkers.
Operation
On the Facebook app, News Feed is the first screen to appear, partially leading most users to think of the feed as Facebook itself.
An integral part of the News Feed interface is the Mini Feed, a news stream on the user's profile page that shows updates about that user. Unlike in the News Feed, the user can delete events from the Mini Feed after they appear so that they are no longer visible to profile visitors.
Adam Mosseri is Facebook's vice president in charge of News Feed and Chief Product Officer while Chris Cox runs the Facebook app and News Feed.
Algorithm
Facebook's proprietary algorithms compare the merits of about 2,000 potential posts every time the app is opened, using a complex system based on providing a meaningful experience, over that of clicks, reactions, or reading time.
The News Feed has been described as a filter bubble, showing users personalized results about information deemed interesting to them, in contrary to showing all information, even information that they disagree with. Facebook has been researching this situation since 2010, and initially used an algorithm known as EdgeRank.
By late 2013, clickbait articles had become significantly prevalent, leading Facebook's chief product officer Chris Cox's team to hire survey panels to assess how News Feed was working. Subsequently, Facebook began adding ever-increasing numbers of data points to its algorithm to significantly reduce clickbait.
Effect on opinion
A 2015 study published in Science concluded that Facebook's algorithms had a minimal effect on the news feed's diversity though the study prompted academic criticism.
See also
- List of Facebook features
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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