 |
| Facebook gives users more control over what they see |
The Facebook platform has introduced several new features that give users more control over the feed, including an easier way to turn off the feed's mathematical ranking and display the content in the order in which it was published.
The changes made depend on previous modifications to the feed functionality. Facebook launched a popular tool in October last year that allows users to select up to 30 friends and pages and mark their content or view it in a separate feed.
The company also gives users options to sort feeds by last time, but hides those options in an opaque list.
Facebook is now working to make these filters more visible and place them at the top of the feed as separate tabs that users can switch between.
Filter Bar launched worldwide today via the Facebook app for Android and will be available for iOS in the coming weeks. It is not clear if it can be used via the web version of Facebook.
It should be noted that the filter bar is not a permanent addition to the Facebook user interface. If the user has not accessed the Favorites tool for seven days, the filter bar will disappear.
Then you have to find your favorites via the feed's Settings menu, and then the filter bar is displayed again. If you visit a new tab every now and then, the tab will disappear as well.
Launched in April, the tool allows users to click on posts suggested by Facebook's algorithm to see why it was recommended.
These guidelines now cover post suggestions from pages or people that users don't follow, and explain how topics related to posts, interactions, and websites led to their suggestions.
Although these changes are relatively minor, they generally give people more control over Facebook's often opaque algorithms.
These changes show that the world's largest social network is eager to distract critics from the decisions of its algorithm.