Remember when you first created your Facebook profile and liked anything that even remotely connected to one of your interests? All the bands, movies, actors, TV series, books, etc. that had a page on Facebook which you like meant you would receive all their posts on your newsfeed.
Most of those liked pages don’t offer much to you — another picture of that cute movie star or a funny article containing plenty of GIFs to point out 34 ways you know you’re a Stag.
The most common types of articles shared or liked on Facebook are from BuzzFeed or Huffington Post — not necessarily the most reliable of news sources. In the past, Facebook users have clicked on links that send them to sites similar to that of BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, Upworthy and Viral Nova.
The stories that appear on your newsfeed because your friends liked or shared it are determined by an algorithm.
Currently, Facebook is reworking their algorithm in order to place more mainstream news on people’s newsfeeds. For many users, Facebook is their outlet to learning what’s going on in the world.
To accomplish their goal of providing higher-quality news to its users, Facebook rewrote its algorithms in order to sift through the sites and allow those of greater content to appear more prevalently on your newsfeed as if someone has liked or shared the article.
Personally, I feel that changing a few algorithms is not going to shake the world. I don’t click on every link that a friend shares or read whichever Huffington Post article is recommended.
If I want to know what’s going on outside the virtual realm, I’d check out BBC or CNN — something that won’t just have a list of GIFs or pictures to make me laugh. While I admire Facebook for attempting to make the next generation less obsessed with memes or lower-grade websites, I don’t think it will be very effective.
A changed algorithm will influence a small percentage of the public, but it won’t be the game-changer that it’s made out to be. For an internet-obsessed generation, there will always be sites to distract us and fill our minds with meaningless information — new Facebook algorithms will not change that.
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