A diferent top news sample from the experiment reveals the following: Of 42 posts displayed, only three of the stories published by my “friends” came without any form of interaction by others (that is, without any likes or comments). My top news was filled with stories that obviously signify engagement and interaction. Although distribution of the specific types of stories published varied over the course of the six months in which I systematically studied the news feed, stories without significant interaction seemed to be filtered out. The fact that there were almost no stories by friends that made it to the top news without any form of engagement by others strengthens the impression of an algorithmic bias toward making those stories that signify engagement more visible than those that do not. No mater how meticulous the counting and comparing between the two feeds may be, the exact percentage of stories making it to the top news remains largely obscure.
However, my initial experiments showed what Facebook only later confirmed— that, on average, Facebook users only see a small percentage of what they could have been seeing. Of the “1,500+ stories a person might see whenever they log onto Facebook, news feed displays approximately 300” (Boland, 2014). Making it onto the news feed has become a competitive advantage, especially for an increasing number of business pages. On Facebook, becoming visible is to be selected by the algorithm. Inscribed in the algorithmic logic of the news feed is the idea that visibility functions as a reward rather than as punishment, as is the case with Foucault’s notion of panopticism. This is even truer today than when the data reported on in this chapter were collected. In the first half of 2011, the top news feed primarily showed a mixture of stories from friends and pages, giving prominence to cluster stories or what I have called communication stories to provide the impression of constant activity and engagement. While stories of the type “X commented on Y’s photo” are still shown in the news feed, most of these stories are now shown as they happen and displayed as part of the much smaller Ticker feed. Talking about changes to the news feed since its conception in 2006, Chris Cox, vice president for products at Facebook, remarked that the most noticeable changes have come from what he sees as emergent types of activity—specifically, content derived from “groups” (King, 2013). Indeed, when I look at the kind of content shown on the news feed at the time of this writing in early 2015, stories from the diferent groups of which I am a member figure much more prominently than before. Now, updates from diferent housing search groups, local buy-and-sell groups, or community groups are competing with updates from friends and “pages” for atention in the news feed.
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