Facebook's control over its News Feed is controversial and often opaque to the outside.
The social network now wants to shed more light on what it suppresses, but not completely removes. Facebook released its Content Distribution Guidelines on Thursday. It details the roughly three-dozen types it degrades for different reasons in the News Feed. These include clickbait posts and repeat policy offenders. This process uses machine learning technology to detect and automatically throttle the reach of offensive comments and posts without the author being aware.
Facebook's guidelines don't cover everything. They have mostly been confirmed over the years in multiple reports, but are now publishing the first time in one location. They don't explain how a demotion works or how it affects the reach of a particular piece of content. You may not be able to see how much a particular type of post is being throttled in the News Feed compared to a post about misinformation or health.
We want to be able to see clearly what is important but not worth removing.
Jason Hirsch, Facebooks head for integrity policy, stated that we want to be clearer about what we consider problematic, but not worth removing. He stated that the company plans to update the guidelines with more information over time, including details about how demotions throttle certain types of content relative to other types. He said that Facebook will not likely rank the severity demotions for antagonistic reasons.
Facebook could detail the guidelines to avoid any controversy when it blocks a viral post about a high-profile subject, such as the story it suppressed in The New York Post on U.S. President Joe Biden's son Hunter. The guidelines state that Facebook will not publish stories that users dispute as being inaccurate, as it did with The Post's questionable reporting. This policy continues until the network of fact-checkers completes a review. This policy was only made public after critics accused Facebook of political bias for censoring The Post.
The distribution guidelines state that other content Facebook degrades includes links to spam sites and low-quality comments. These include posts from accounts that share very frequently, posts from groups, and news articles that do not have a clear byline.
Hirsch says that the release of these guidelines is part a larger effort to make the News Feed more transparent to the public. Politicians and media outlets are increasingly looking at Facebook's negative impact on the world. In the US, lawmakers are seeking to regulate how social media companies manage their platforms.
Facebook just released its first quarterly report about the most-viewed content on its News Feed. This was after journalists used CrowdTangle (its public-facing analyst tool), to find that right-leaning people are most active on the service. Although CrowdTangle is a self-service, real time tool that allows users to view the most popular data, it would require a significant amount of resources and time. However, he said the company was not opposed to doing this eventually.
