Take control of your Facebook News Feed with ‘Why Am I Seeing This Post’ feature

Facebook introduces a new control feature to let users decide what they want to see on their News Feed. — Facebook

Facebook has unveiled a “Why Am I Seeing This Post” feature that allows users to gain more insight about the content that appears on their News Feed.

This feature is meant for users who are curious about how or why certain postings have found its way into the News Feeds.

Found under the drop-down menu in the right corner of a post, it will give users an idea how post ranking works, said Ramya Senthuraman, product manager for Facebook News Feed.

“Ranking is the process in which we connect people to the posts that are most meaningful and relevant to them,” she added.

She claimed that on average, there are thousands of posts that users could see when they log in to Facebook.

“But people only have time to view a few hundreds of posts in the News Feed. So this means that the ranking process helps us to feed the most relevant posts to our users,” she said.

By clicking on “Why Am I Seeing This Post”, users will be told that they are seeing the info because, for instance, “You’re friends with (another user)” or “You’re a member of (a certain group)”.

Posts with a significant number of Comments, Reacts and Likes are also likely to appear on your News Feed.

Or it could be other factors such as Recent Reactions that influenced the order of the posts that appears on your News Feed. Apparently, if a user has interacted with a post by responding with an emoji, then future postings by this user or group is likely to appear on his or her News Feed again.

“There’s a funny meme that comes out every now and then which says that your News Feed is limited to a certain number of friends,” she said.

“If you often interact with a particular set of friends or pages that you follow, you’re more likely to see more posts from them in your News Feed. We do not artificially limit the number of friends (posts) that you see in your News Feed.”

Ramya admits that sometimes the ranking process is not perfect.

“We do understand that ranking doesn’t always get things right. There are posts that can create bad experiences for users on Facebook. So it’s important to provide people with the controls they see the kind of News Feed experience that they desire.”

The feature also comes with Manage What You See In News Feed function with shortcuts like See First to give it priority, Unfollow so you no longer see the person’s posts but still remain friends, News Feed Preferences and Privacy Shortcuts.

Users can even hide a single post to see fewer content from a specific person, page or group. Then there’s the option to Snooze a person, page or group for a certain amount of time.

The feature will be rolled out to users in phases starting today and the company is targeting to get it to everyone by the end of the month.

In order to get the feature, Facebook recommends users to update to the latest version of the app.