Posts that you see in your News Feed are meant to keep you connected to the people and things that you care about, starting with your friends and family. Posts that you see first are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook. The number of comments, likes, and reactions a post receives and what kind of story it is (example: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear higher up in your News Feed. (Facebook, 2018)
What we see is the apparent disappearance of the algorithm, seemingly replaced by the agency of the user and the network. Recall just how the logic of the news feed was described by the Help Center in late 2013: “The News Feed algorithm uses several factors to determine top stories, including the number of comments, who posted the story and what type of post it is” (Facebook, 2013). In the midst of what became publicly known as the Facebook emotion experiment during summer 2014, Facebook’s Help Center conveniently replaced any mention of the algorithm with human-centered factors. The changes that were made to the Help Center descriptions of the news feed back in 2014 still more or less persist to this day. Now the regime of visibility on the news feed is seemingly determined by “your connections and activity” and “the number of comments and likes a post receives.” If users were feeling that they were being experimented on by having their news feeds “manipulated,” the change in description may arguably be seen as Facebook’s atempt to give back some level of control—but also responsibility—to users, if only rhetorically. But we are geting ahead of ourselves.
Let me quickly revisit some of the important changes and developments to the news feed and its algorithmic logic in order to provide some context to the arguments made. Many of Facebook’s most important features and functionalities were implemented in the years 2009–2011, including the “like” buton, the open graph protocol, messenger, and timeline. For users, the changing news feed has always been an issue of heated debate and anguish, especially in terms of the many changes in default setings, privacy setings, transparency, and the usability of the platform. In earlier years, the tabs distinguishing between diferent versions of the feed were visually diferentiated to a greater extent and, therefore, easier to control for users. Or so it seems. While one would think that having two feeds called “most recent” and “top news” would imply a clear distinction between an unfiltered and a filtered feed, respectively, a decade of Facebook history has repeatedly shown that nothing can be taken for granted. During February 2011, Facebook changed the setings and options for the “most recent” feed. Two basic setings were implemented, a seemingly unfiltered one, showing stories from “all of your friends and pages” as well as a filtered one displaying only “friends and pages you interact with most.” It was not so much the fact that Facebook changed the news feed feature yet again that brought about public outcry on the mater but the fact that Facebook had changed the default seting of the “most recent” feed to “friends and pages you interact with most”
Life at the Top
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