Don't unfriend, just unfollow: Facebook's News Feed finally gives users more control

Are you irritated with the constant bombardment of inane quizzes or cat videos on your Facebook News Feed shared by Pages you may have liked or friends you follow? Well, Facebook is out to rectify that after it released updates to its News Feed algorithm, this time giving users more control over what will appear on their feeds. These updates are applicable for both the desktop as well as mobile apps. The update will also give users insights into why certain posts appear on their news feed and give them the choice to filter these posts. The rollout has started gradually, so don’t sweat if you still don’t see any changes immediately. You will see a new settings page dedicated just for News Feed. Using this page, you can analyse which pages and people take up the most space on your News Feed and then be provided with an option to Unfollow these people without Unfriending them. While the **Unfollow option** has been around for quite a while now, you now get additional options in the dropdown present at the top right hand corner of each post. Apart from ‘Unfollow’ and ‘I don’t want to see this’, you will now also get the option ‘See less’. [caption id=“attachment_241086” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  The options which you can get on each post[/caption] According to Adam Mosseri who spoke to WSJ, people want more control on Facebook and users can expect more customisations of the News Feed settings page in the future. He said that Facebook is also contemplating adding the ability to regulate posts based on topics such as Technology, Breaking News and so on. [caption id=“attachment_241087” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  A new feature called See Less from… in addition to Unfollow has been added with the new update[/caption] Facebook News Feed algorithm has been seeing updates regularly. One of the reasons behind content going viral is excessive sharing on Facebook. We have all seen how the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge  fared on Facebook. Also quizzes taken by your friends who put up its results online and not to mention the constant Candy Crush invites from friends you have barely spoken for ages showing up in your feed, really add no value. These things can not only be annoying, but can also keep you away from actual hard news or important updates from your friends, which may be breaking at that moment. Sure, Facebook is not a news website, but with the new updates, Facebook is trying to let you decide if you want viral videos populating your news feed or only important content. [caption id=“attachment_241088” align=“aligncenter” width=“640”]  Under the News Feed Settings option, you get a consolidated view of people you are seeing the most content from as well as people who you have recently unfollowed. You can re-follow them easily[/caption] For news publishers and creators of viral content, this new update is particularly important as it stresses on the need to come up with compelling content. Facebook had also recently decided to keep a check on click-baity articles from users’ news feeds.  Facebook did that by analysing how much time users are spending on such articles - if users were clicking on the link and then immediately coming back to Facebook, the story was a click bait. The other way Facebook was using to analyse such posts was to see if it had the user engaged - did the user like, comment or share the link before/after clicking on it? If not, the story was probably less on substance. The new updates to the News Feed will place more control in the users’ hands by giving them explicit controls rather than having a bot do that for you. This might win Facebook some brownie points, considering not long ago, it had carried out an  **experiment which manipulated users' feeds** to show either positive or negative posts. While Facebook explained that it had no evil intentions behind the social experiment, it was clearly unethical. While the desktop updates have started rolling out since last Friday, the mobile updates will be coming out in a few weeks.