Facebook Tweaks News Feed To Show More Posts From Friends And Family

The social media giant says it updated the news feed so that people will see more posts from their friends and family and more tailored selections from news or media outlets that cater to the specific interests of the user.

The winners: you and your friends, whose posts will receive more exposure than they have in the recent past.

Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is constantly engaged in an algorithmic balancing act.

The technical change this time around is that Facebook will favor links shared by your friends and family over links that publishers place directly into the News Feed through their pages.

In other words, Facebook is shifting back toward what it was originally created to do before it stumbled into the news distribution business.

The move suggests that Facebook is as determined as ever to continue putting the user experience first. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, for example, alleged this week that Google and Facebook were trying to encourage a “remain ” vote in Britain’s referendum on European Union membership by encouraging voting, asserting that media users are disproportionately youthful and pro-Europe. After all, every time we visit, Facebook gets another fraction of a cent in advertising revenue.

Why is Facebook doing this?

Here’s how the change will impact Facebook, and what it means for investors.

Rather than pull back the curtain on its algorithm entirely, which many tech companies are loath to do, Facebook instead advised news organizations which types of stories are destined to perform well.

But it’s not just publishers who will be affected.

It’s important to note that while we welcome a multitude of viewpoints, we also believe strongly that people should feel – and be – safe when they use Facebook, and we therefore have Community Standards that define the behavior that we think is out-of-bounds on the platform.

“It will vary a lot by publisher mostly based on how much of their referral traffic or their reach is based on people who actually share their content directly”, Mosseri said. Though, if most of a Page’s traffic comes from shares, likes and comments, the impact should be milder. Forget Google, forget newsletters, forget home pages: At this point, Facebook provides anywhere from half to three-quarters (and often more) of many publishers’ monthlyaudiences. Okay, Facebook didn’t say that because Facebook would never say that. Well, Facebook says that posts from your nearest and dearest will be given priority over content from other people. Businesses anxious the adjustment would make it more hard to reach people without having to pay to promote posts. “This underscores that even more”.

” ‘I don’t want us to talk about the algorithm as this third party, ‘ Mosseri said”. “They control the algorithm, whereas we have only a dim insight into it”. Less common will be articles and information directly posted by brands and publishers, TIME among them.