Amid ongoing debate and discussion regarding the potential negative impacts of their algorithm-based News Feeds, Facebook is testing out a range of new control options, both for individual users and advertisers. These new protocols aim to enable users to influence what they see, helping brands avoid unwanted association via ad placement within the app.
Control What You Can
To start things off, for individual users, Facebook aims to make its existing News Feed control options easier to find. Facebook is supposedly also working on giving people public discourse more capacity to reduce certain types of content that appear on their feeds.
Facebook explains:
“As part of this, people can now increase or reduce the amount of content they see from the friends, family, Groups and Pages they’re connected to and the topics they care about in their News Feed Preferences.”
Users can have more control over what appears on their feeds through Facebook’s News Feed Preferences as it enables them to be able to select their favorite profiles that will then be given higher priority whenever they post, unfollow pages, people, and topics, and even when they ‘snooze’ on others. All of this would be on unified listings.
Facebook’s News Feed Preferences already have a good number of control options, and soon there will even be more, including the capacity to increase/decrease that content you’re shown from each element. The inner machinations as to how it achieves this are still unclear up to now, but all we can say is that we’re at least glad that it works.
As it stands, it gives people a good way to control what shows up on their feeds, provided of course that they actually use it. This is where the clincher argument lies since research data from the past shows that a lot of users don’t even bother changing their Facebook settings, even when there are clear reasons to do so. It’s a win-win for Facebook in this case, because it puts the onus on users, giving them more control, while simultaneously being aware that many still won’t bother. It adds to people’s content control capabilities, while managing to maintain usage status-quo at the same time with very little side effects.
On that note, algorithmic amplification was a key area of concern highlighted by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen in her many testimonials about the platform’s negative impacts. Haugen insists that social networks should be forced to stop using engagement-based algorithms altogether as they seem to incentivize negative behaviors for the sake of driving more engagement.
From this, it’s also pretty evident that Facebook algorithms have greatly impacted public discourse. With all kinds of news publishers on Facebook looking to maximize and boost their overall reach, we’re also more exposed to sharing partisan and divisive content, those that often lead to more angst and dispute.
The Wrap
They say that prevention is always better than the cure, and in this case, that certainly holds true. By giving users more control options to limit the impacts of negative behavior-inducing content, Facebook is making a good step towards being a better social network.
To add, Facebook is said to also be expanding its Topic Exclusion controls, stating that:
“The advertiser topic exclusion control allows an advertiser to select a topic to help define how we’ll show the ad on Facebook, including News Feed. Advertisers can select three topics – News and Politics, Social Issues, and Crime & Tragedy. When an advertiser selects one or more topics, their ad will not be delivered to people recently engaging with those topics in their News Feed.”
This would essentially enable advertisers to avoid unwanted associations with such topics, assuring brands that they won’t end up suffering any negative impacts as a result. At the end of the day, more control options simply mean more capability to guard against harmful content, and that is always a good thing.
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