Facebook users will also be able to easily discover new friends and Pages to follow from the new Preferences. But those stated preferences provide Facebook with still more data with which to figure out who you are. Expect brands to campaign for you to add them to your See First section so you never miss their posts. 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.
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Second, it’s now easier to unfollow people. Facebook analyzes those patterns, preferences, and behaviors to show you more of what it thinks you’ll like-including particular advertisements. In other words, if you choose to see posts from Nike at the top of your feed, an advertiser won’t show you an ad because of that decision.
“That is why we want to give you more ways to control what you see”.
In either case, that’s made the news feed a common target of critics, who argue that it is fundamentally disempowering: While algorithms helpfully power much of what we see online, this one makes choices for you without your conscious or considered input.
However – if you change your mind about one of your friends, the social network has also added a new preferences page to let you follow friends again.
But while See First should help you find what you’re looking for, it could impact Facebook’s business. In November, the company gave users the ability to edit news from a person or page. Whereas that move was a way to remove unwanted stuff from your fed, the latest feature allows you to prioritize updates, allowing you to organize the info with your own personal filter.
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Meanwhile, See First creates a new holy grail for marketers looking to boost their Page’s audience amongst declining reach. The playful crab Preferences mascot makes choosing your settings nearly fun, if that’s even possible. Similar to the videos, related posts will appear higher in News Feeds based on the kinds of content users spend time on. The company has spent years building a system that automatically sifts through the thousands of things you could see every day to determine the dozens or hundreds it’s going to show you. Have a change of heart? 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.
