Facebook might soon help you manage the overly chatty people in your social stream. According to a statement from Facebook parent company Meta, it’s testing News Feed controls that let you raise or lower the volume of content you see from friends, groups, Pages, and relevant topics. If a relative post far too often while a favorite group hardly shows up at all, you can balance their appearances in your preferences.
“This is part of our ongoing work to give people more control over News Feed, so they see more of what they want and less of what they don’t,” Meta said. “We’re also making existing controls easier to access, including Favorites, Snooze, Unfollow, and Reconnect.”
Already available controls for favorites, reconnecting, snoozing, and unfollowing should also be easier to find. Facebook’s test is initially available to only a “small percentage” of users, but it should expand over the weeks ahead. The company is giving advertisers options to exclude their ads from broad topics like “News and Politics,” “Crime and Tragedy” and “Debated Social Issues.”
How the social media giant controls its News Feed has largely been a mystery, but Facebook released a report in September it said would give the public some insights into how it decides what content it suppresses, or “demotes” — like clickbait and posts from those who repeatedly violate its rules.
The timing is appropriate, although it might not satisfy critics. Whistleblower Frances Haugen and supporting politicians have blasted Facebook’s algorithmic feeds for promoting engagement over healthy social media habits. Likewise, Meta just recently limited ad targeting for sensitive topics across its products. These latest moves put some of the power back in the hands of users and marketers, but don’t offer as much control as some would like.
Facebook is also going to make changes to news controls for its business customers, expanding the “topic exclusion” controls to a test group of advertisers that run ads in English. The advertisers can select from three topic groups — news and politics, social issues, and crime and tragedy— so that they can prevent their ads from appearing near posts about those topics if they prefer.
