Facebook isn’t likely to stop recommending posts in your Feed anytime soon, but it is offering a few options for controlling the content you see there.
On Wednesday, Facebook parent company Meta announced that the social networking platform is offering two more ways to customize your feed: by selecting “Show more” or “Show less” on individual posts, and by adjusting new settings in Feed Preferences.
The new Show more/Show less feature will allow users to tell Facebook if they want to see more or less posts that are similar to the post you’re looking at. Selecting “Show more” means your Feed will show more posts that are similar to a given post. “Show less” will do the opposite. The feature can be used on both posts from your Facebook connections and posts that Facebook suggests to you. In its blog post announcement, Meta offered an explanation of how the feature works:
“Selecting Show more will temporarily increase the ranking score for that post and posts like it. If you select Show less, you’ll temporarily decrease its ranking score. By offering more ways to incorporate direct feedback into Feed ranking, we’re making our artificial intelligence systems smarter and more responsive.”
For now, you may see the Show more/Show less feature as discrete buttons on certain posts in your Feed. Meta plans to eventually incorporate the feature into the posts’ three-dot menus and is “starting to test this feature in Reels.”
The other new Feed customization option that Facebook says it is “exploring” is a set of new settings users can adjust to determine “how much content you see in Feed from the friends and family, Groups, Pages and public figures you’re connected to.”
While we couldn’t see the new settings on the Android app or on the desktop website, Meta’s announcement did include an image of these new settings, whoch essentially look like drop-down menus that let users decide if they want to see more, less or “normal” amounts of posts from different sources of Facebook posts (friends, groups, or pages).
