Facebook’s Latest News Feed Change Aims To Reward High-Quality Content

Continuing its promise to be more transparent about how the News Feed works, Facebook has announced another tweak to how it decides what stories show up there.

Facebook says it has developed a new algorithm that’s aimed at identifying and showing “high quality content,” and it’ll be rolling out to all users in the next few weeks.

The changes are based on user feedback to a number of questions, such as “Is this content from a source you would trust?” and “Is the content genuinely interesting to you or is it trying to game News Feed distribution? (e.g., asking for people to like the content).”

We used the results of this survey to build a new machine learning system to detect content defined as high quality. The system uses over a thousand different factors, such as how frequently content from a certain Page is reported as low quality (e.g., hiding a Page post), how complete the Page profile is, and whether the fan base for a particular Page overlaps with the fan base of other known high quality Pages. Coming up with an algorithm to detect this is complex, and we will continue to refine it as we get more feedback.

In testing with a small group of users, Facebook says the new algorithm led to “a significant increase in interactions (likes, comments, shares) with this content” and fewer hidden stories overall.

Facebook estimates that most Page owners will see a “relatively small” impact from the News Feed tweak, and Pages already experiencing high engagement may see increased reach.

The News Feed algorithm has undergone significant changes in the past couple years. We took a deep dive on that recently — see the first article below in the related articles list.