Facebook speaks out

“There have been recent claims suggesting that our News Feed algorithm suppresses organic distribution of posts in favour of paid posts in order to increase our revenue. This is not true,” says Facebook, adding that the News Feed algorithm is separate from the advertising algorithm.

 “We don’t replace the most engaging posts in News Feed with sponsored ones.”

According to the social network, Bilton’s argument is based on an “apples-to-oranges” comparison. In his article, Bilton notes that when Facebook first introduced the ‘subscribe’ option, he quickly amassed more than 25 000 followers and his public posts would garner hundreds of ‘likes’ and interactions.

Bilton’s followers on Facebook now exceed 400 000 people, but he says he has noticed a sharp decline in interactions – now averaging just 30 likes and two shares per post. Bilton appears not to be alone in his observations, and a number of other prominent journalists and writers have said they have noticed a drop in interaction too.

Facebook says: “You can’t compare engagement rates on two different posts year-over-year. A few data points should not be taken as representative of what actually is happening overall. There are numerous factors that may affect distribution, including quality and number of posts.”

Making changes

Facebook argues the anecdotal evidence offered by Bilton and others is not reflective of what is happening on the social network overall: “In fact, the opposite is happening overall – engagement has gone up 34% on posts from people who have more than 10 000 followers.”

Facebook does, however, acknowledge it has observed instances where early adopters of the “follow” feature have seen their follower numbers go up, but their engagement figures go down since a year ago.

According to Facebook, when follow was first launched, a large number of users adopted it. “A lot of users started following public figures who had turned on follow. Over time, some of those users engaged less with those figures, and so we started showing fewer stories from those figures to users who didn't engage as much with their stories.

“The News Feed changes we made in the autumn to focus on higher quality stories may have also decreased the distribution for less engaging stories from public figures.”

The social network adds that over the last six months, it has been introducing changes to solve this problem of decreased distribution and to promote more content from public figures. Facebook says since implementing these changes, its index of partners have seen a 35% increase in traffic.

On Thursday this week (7 March) Facebook is expected to reveal a redesign of its News Feed, although at this stage it is unclear if the redesign will be for mobile or the Web, or both.

The last major redesign of the News Feed was implemented in 2011, along with the introduction of the Timeline layout for user profiles. Since then, many tweaks and updates have been made, but the overall look and feel has remained the same.