Facebook to tell users source of news feeds
FACEBOOK will begin telling its users why posts appear in their news feeds as it seeks to ease concerns about the spread of fake news and its influence over billions of people’s reading habits.
The social network will today introduce a button on each post revealing why users are seeing it, including factors such as whether they have interacted often with the person who made the post or whether it is popular with other users.
The feature will open a rare window into the opaque world of Facebook’s content ranking algorithms, which researchers have described as a “black box” and which MPS have said should be audited by the Government.
It comes as part of a wider effort to make Facebook’s systems more transparent and secure in advance of the EU elections in May and attempts by European and American politicians to regulate social media. But it also omits some of the reasons that people are shown particular posts, which may lead to claims that it is masking some of its algorithm’s most contentious decisions.
“We hear from people frequently that they don’t know how the news feed algorithm works, why things show up where they do, as well as how their data is used,” John Hegeman, Facebook’s vice president of news feed, said. “This is a step towards addressing that.
“We recognise how important the platform has become in the world, and that means we have a responsibility to ensure that people who use it have a good experience and that it can’t be used in ways that are harmful.
“We are making decisions that are really important, and so we are trying to be more and more transparent … we want the external world to be able to hold us accountable.”
Facebook’s news feed is effectively its “front page”, showing a personalised selection of pictures, videos and posts. Its algorithms analyse thousands of pieces of information about each user’s behaviour to predict which content they are most likely to engage with.
That process has been at the centre of concerns about Facebook’s role in filtering information and spreading misinformation, with the European Commission conducting a probe into “algorithmic transparency” and British MPS concluding that Facebook’s algorithms should be audited by a regulator.
Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, backed stricter regulation for social media companies, though he did not include any auditing of algorithms.