The annoying posts in your Facebook news feed will soon come with an explanation box
One of the persistent criticisms of Facebook is that the news feed is a black box. From this week on, the box will suddenly take a shadow of dark gray.
No one outside the firm fully understands why they saw this post or that. We know that Facebook's news feed algorithms are responsible for what is shown in our news feeds. And we know that it is regularly adjusted and tweaked without really knowing how. Even the company itself said the opaque system leads to mistrust. Now Facebook is taking small steps to shed some light on why the news area does what it does.
On Sunday, Facebook announced that it is adding a "Why do I see this post?" The News Feed feature as a way to add transparency to what is literally the central part of the social network. The live tool this week will give users some context around why posts are displayed – as well as more importantly, links to controls that allow users to fine-tune things like what they see in the news feed and how they can change their privacy settings.
The greater availability of content controls is as important as novice users will learn about what's coming up on their news feed, since most Facebook users still don't know how the information is used by the company, according to a Pew survey.
There are two main points here. First, users should have easier access to control over their own news stream. Second, it is not clear how much Facebook users will now know about why posts appear and what the company knows about them with this tool. We begin to answer this question later this week as the new features roll out.
Facebook, like Google and other tech giants, is regularly criticized for lack of algorithmic transparency. News Feed manipulation was at the heart of Facebook's role in foreign disruption in the 2016 US elections. The news feed is where misinformation about vaccines is delivered, that is how all misinformation on the platform spreads quickly, and that's why zero for weird news stories that hurt fears and go immense viruses without any explanation.
In the Silicon Valley companies, there are often algorithmic mathematical formulas and procedures designed to process certain information and complete tasks that shape what we see on the world's largest sites. Google's search, Twitter's (non-chronological) timeline and Facebook's News Feed are three of many examples of how opaque codeparts determine what we see and hear without us in the decision-making process.
The new news feed feature is similar to "Why do I see this ad?" The feature that has been present on Facebook ads since 2014. The same criticism applies to Facebook's ad serving system, which contains the same power to determine what is being put in front of you on the social network.
This advertising tool also gets an update, announced Facebook, so users can soon see if advertisers were working with marketing partners on specific ads, and when advertisers uploaded targeting information that causes the ad to appear first.
Neither the news feed tool nor the enhanced advertising tool has yet to launch. But more importantly, even when they do, they will only give some measurement of context than complete transparency. It is not clear exactly what the users will know about what they are looking at that which remains hidden, or when the information they see will lose relevance, an important point given the news feeds history of drastic and opaque changes.
Facebook's news feed transparency comes as the company does a show of its efforts to change among a growing chorus of critics. After co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's statement that the famous know-it-all and track-them-whole company would focus on privacy, Zuckerberg asked for more regulation, and the company announced that it would finally ban white nationalism and fight misinformation about issues such as anti – vaccination conspiracies.
At the same time, the company regularly announces the removal of accounts used by political actors worldwide who use Facebook to run an agenda in manipulative ways. On Monday, Facebook reported that removing hundreds of unauthorized accounts from India and Pakistan was used to propaganda in the wake of historical tensions between the two nuclear weapons.
It is clear that Facebook sees its global scale and Continued ambition for growth as something beyond its own control. In Silicon Valley, the word "scale" is both an executive favorite excuse and its most sought after goal.
The question for each of Facebook's actions is now, do they actually address and solve these problems, or are they band-aids on staff wounds?
