New Facebook settings let you play favorites – Jul. 9, 2015

Facebook suggests Pages based on those the user has liked in the past. The company has spent a lot of time working on ways to make sure it surfaces interesting and relevant content – but no matter how good its algorithms are, there’s a good chance that your page is often littered with stuff from “friends” you’re not that close with and pages you’ve liked over the years that you can’t remember liking in the first place. Posts from the profiles you’ve selected will appear in your feed with a blue star in the upper right corner, indicating that you selected the profile. Your chosen friends and pages can now get top billing, so all the insightful commentary from your literary friends isn’t subsumed by the incoherent ranting of that dude you knew in high school but can’t quite bring yourself to unfriend.

➤ Updated Controls for News Feed [Facebook Newsroom]. This was possible before, but the new setting makes it much simpler and faster; just scroll through and check off all the people you don’t want to hear from in your News Feel.

Facebook announced this morning that it is ready to give you more control over what shows up your feed on a daily or hourly basis.

Not only is it the first page you come across when you visit the website, but it is also the hub for all the latest updates from your online fiends, viral videos and news.

For the first option, you can go through the friends and pages you follow and select ones that you always want to see posts from.

Facebook’s new News Feed Preferences is rolling out to iOS today and will hit Android and desktop users in “the coming weeks”.

The last update to the iPhone and iPad Facebook app is a new discovery option. (According to one oft-quoted paper, more than 60 percent of Facebook users don’t even realize that a system algorithmically ranks and filters the posts they see.). In November, the company gave users the ability to edit news from a person or page.

You can get See First and a redesigned Preferences section of the Facebook app Thursday as part of an app update on iOS. Have a change of heart? If you’re getting sick of seeing a certain someone’s annoying political posts you can easily unfollow them here. But the system is pretty opaque; we don’t know quite how our inputs map to Facebook’s outputs, if we’re aware that we’re “inputting” anything.