Mark Zuckerberg Promises To Give Facebook Users More News Feed Controls

[Update: Moments after we posted this story, Facebook announced that it’s giving users more News Feed controls. Here’s the post about the changes on an official Facebook blog. Here’s our post about the update: Facebook Makes It Easier To Unfollow People & Pages In News Feed.] Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he hears “loud and […]

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[Update: Moments after we posted this story, Facebook announced that it’s giving users more News Feed controls. Here’s the post about the changes on an official Facebook blog. Here’s our post about the update: Facebook Makes It Easier To Unfollow People & Pages In News Feed.]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he hears “loud and clear” that Facebook users want more control over their News Feed.

And yesterday during his townhall Q&A, Zuckerberg said that the company will be working on the issue in the coming year. The promise came during an answer to a commonly asked question: Why not give users more ways to tinker with the mix of what they see on Facebook?

Facebook, of course, does provide such options — users can choose to switch their feed to see recent stories and can create lists of friends and brands they want to keep closer tabs on — but Zuckerberg admitted that those options haven’t been a Facebook priority. Those features are buried in hard to find places on the platform, which means they likely don’t get much use.

Facebook has concentrated its News Feed efforts to tuning the algorithm to give every user “the perfect personalized newspaper,” based on the type of content each person interacts with most. People who like to see photos see more of them. People who are interested in international news see more of that. People who only want to see updates from friends aren’t served as much political news or other public content.

“That’s a lot of what we are trying to do,” Zuckerberg said, “work on ranking News Feed and making it so that we show you the very best content that we can for you. Part of what we need to do is also give more controls. In addition to just kind of adapting to how you use the products, that you can explicitly tune your News Feed and say ‘I want more of this.’

“That’s something that we are going to work on and do more of hopefully in the next year because it’s something that we’ve heard very loud and clear from a lot of people in our community that it’s very important to you.”


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About the author

Martin Beck
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Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.

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