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Who Controls Your Facebook Feed
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Who Controls Your Facebook Feed

A small team of engineers in Menlo Park. A panel of anonymous power users around the world. And, increasingly, you.

Will Oremus
Slate, 2016
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Cute kittens, high school friends’ wedding photos, inspirational quotes and political endorsements are just a few of the things that may – or may not – pop up on your Facebook news feed if you’re one of the site’s billion-plus users. But how does it all get there? And what happens to the stuff that doesn’t make the cut? Slate’s senior technology writer Will Oremus takes you on a journey through Facebook’s Menlo Park campus, where machines learn their most valuable lessons from – who would have guessed it? – humans. So if you’re curious about why you seem to see so many photos of your great-aunt Dottie’s new puppy on Facebook, getAbstract recommends reading this useful explanation of the inner workings of the site’s news feed.

Take-Aways

  • Facebook uses a “prediction algorithm” with hundreds of variables to comb through 1,500 to 10,000 posts each week to create your news feed.
  • The algorithm assigns each post a relevance score and puts the posts you’re most likely to care about at the top of the news feed.
  • Its algorithm uses historical data to guess how you’ll interact with each post – whether it’s something you’ll like, comment on, click on, hide or even mark as spam.

About the Author

Will Oremus is a senior technology writer at Slate. He writes on technology policy, emerging tech and digital culture.

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