1. Facebook
Tweaks to
Promote High
News Content
Maxine
Hamilton &
Ollie Killick
11 December
2013
Background
Facebook is recognizing that people are increasingly
using social media as a filter to help consume news
content (Pew Research Centre found 64% of US adults use
Facebook daily and half of these users consume news on
the site) and is changing its algorithms to favour what it
has termed ‘high quality content.’
Details
Facebook reported in a recent blog post that the average
referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has almost
tripled in the past year. The new method of ranking the
news content shared on the site feeds into the algorithms
which decide what surfaces in peoples’ News Feeds. The
systems also pays close attention to what people click on
their mobiles, and will rank the content accordingly.
Therefore, the change will be most visible for those who
use Facebook on mobile. Two other upcoming changes
have also been announced. Firstly, the site will begin
showing users recommended articles - after you’ve
clicked an article link, links to three other relevant articles
will be shown directly beneath the News Feed post that
you clicked on. The second change will be that old articles which you’ve commented on will
resurface in your feed if it has new comments from your friends; something Facebook hopes will
provoke more conversations around articles.
It’s unclear how users will react to these changes. Currently, unlike Twitter where activity from your
entire social graph is shown in a chronological feed, Facebook’s algorithm picks content based on
what, and who, you tend to interact with. This formula is customisable to an extent. Users can take
a survey or choose to have their News Feed arranged in chronological order, but Facebook tries to
push users away from this set up as it finds that people tend to interact with fewer stories. These
changes mean that content that hasn’t been produced by users’ friends will be more likely to
surface than before, which could irritate users who come to the site to for personal news and not
mainstream news.
Summary
Facebook is continually evolving its algorithm to react to how users interact on the site. This is the
latest in a number of recent product updates that have sought to make the network more relevant
to current events and a better place to discover news, something which puts it in more direct
competition with Twitter.