Why does facebook impose timeline

Nowadays, the algorithm that governs Facebook's News Feed has become much more sophisticated. It isn't just about the Like button anymore — and not just because reaction buttons are now in the mix. In fact, Facebook's algorithm is by far the most complicated of the three social networks covered in this post.

When picking posts for each person who logs on to Facebook, the News Feed algorithm takes into account hundreds of variables — and can predict whether a given user will Like, click, comment, share, hide, or even mark a post as spam. More specifically, the algorithm predicts each of these outcomes with a certain degree of confidence. This prediction is quantified into a single number called a "relevancy score" that's specific both to you and to that post.

Once every post that could potentially show up in your feed has been assigned a relevancy score, Facebook's sorting algorithm ranks them and puts them in the order they end up appearing in your feed. This means that every time you log in, the post you see at the top of your News Feed was chosen over thousands of others as the one most likely to make you react and engage.

Ads are given relevancy scores, too, so that Facebook can show users the ads that could matter most to them. Again, this is supposed to give users a better experience — but it's also helpful for the businesses that are paying for the ads.

It's calculated based on the positive feedback video views, conversions, etc. Learn more about relevancy score for Facebook ads here. Before , Facebook was predicting what users want to see on the News Feed based on more indirect signals, like Likes, comments, and shares of others. Eventually, it added options for users to filter out posts they don't want to see. But what about helping boost the posts users do want to see?

Through studies and surveys, Facebook found that many users were concerned about missing important updates from friends they cared about the most. In response to these concerns, the social media platform began changing the News Feed algorithm to give more control to the users themselves. It started in April , when the company began giving priority in the form of higher relevancy scores to posts from friends over the Pages they follow and promotional posts. Later that year, in July, Facebook introduced the "See First" feature , which lets you actually hand-pick which accounts — whether friends or followed Pages — you want to see first at the top of your News Feed.

Now, when you want to prioritize a person or page to "see first," their posts will appear at the top of your News Feed. To prioritize the people or pages you want to "see first": click the downward-facing arrow in the top-right corner of any Facebook page and select Settings. In the window that appears, scroll until you find News Feed Preferences and select it.

Finally, select up to 30 of your Facebook friends to add as favorites. You'll now see posts from these individuals first. Facebook started monitoring how much time users spend viewing certain posts. Of course, the time you spend on a post can vary depending on your internet speed, the length of the post, and so on — and the folks at Facebook are aware of that.

However, the platform's strategists found that dwell time , the act of spending a lot more time on a particular post in their feed compared to the majority of other posts they look at, is a good sign that the content was relevant to them. How does this play out in the feed? If you spend more time on a particular post, Facebook is more likely to show that post on your friends' News Feeds. In summer , Facebook surveyed users on how they interacted with video on their News Feeds and found that many people who were interested in a given video didn't necessarily Like it, comment on it, or share it with their friends.

Since engagement is one of the primary ways Facebook measures people's interest in posts, it had to come up with other ways to figure out whether people enjoyed the videos they were seeing. To do that, the company started monitoring other forms of video engagement — like turning on the audio, switching to full-screen mode, or enabling high definition.

So if you turn up the volume on a video or make it full-screen, the algorithm will interpret that as you enjoying the video, and will show you similar videos higher up in your feed. The update doesn't mean users will see more videos in their News Feed — only those who already engage more with video-related content.

Facebook's algorithm is very, very complex, but we hope that gives you a good idea of what it considers important so you can tweak your Facebook marketing strategy accordingly. Now, let's move on to Twitter. Whereas Facebook makes most of the decisions about what will show up in your Facebook News Feed, Twitter's historically taken a very different approach with what it calls the "Timeline.

Your Timeline is the stream of tweets from the users you follow that shows up on your account home page when you first log in. It used to be that your Timeline was made up of every single tweet from every user you follow, in chronological order.

But the folks at Twitter found that similar to what was happening on Facebook, users felt they were missing all the best tweets from the people they care about most. The changes made to the Twitter algorithm aren't nearly as platform-changing as the ones Facebook has made, but they are somewhat of a departure from the real-time element that has defined Twitter since the beginning.

The engineers at Twitter have attempted two different approaches for surfacing the "best" tweets first on your Timeline: the "While You Were Away" feature and the even newer "Show me the best Tweets first" feature. This feature was added as an attempt to rid users of whatever FOMO fear of missing out they might have been feeling from the chronological nature of the original Timeline. Basically, it's a recap of some of the best tweets you may not have seen otherwise.

How do these tweets make the cut? It's determined by "user engagement". You can't turn off the feature, but how often you see it depends on how often you use Twitter. The recaps pop up more frequently for users who check the app less often. Because it actually changes the content on your Timeline based on a tweet's relevancy, rather than listing tweets chronologically. By default, Twitter's algorithm puts the tweets it thinks you'll find most interesting at the top of your Timeline, these posts are still recent and in reverse chronological order.

These tweets are chosen based on accounts you interact with most, Tweets you engage with, and much more. The rest of the tweets will be displayed right underneath, also in reverse chronological order. This number was later revised to as many as 87 million Facebook profiles.

The articles sought to outline how the data of millions of Facebook users ended up being given to Cambridge Analytica. Christopher Wylie, a co-founder of the political data analytics firm, revealed the alleged practices to both newspapers. Wylie claimed the data sold to Cambridge Analytica was then used to develop "psychographic" profiles of people and deliver pro-Trump material to them online.

Cambridge Analytica has since denied any of Kogan's data was used in connection to the Trump campaign. Meanwhile, U. In a Facebook post published several days after the initial reports, Zuckerberg eventually responded to the continued fallout over the data scandal.

He said: "We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. Zuckerberg also announced the social media giant would no longer allow app developers to access its users' data after three months of inactivity and it would reduce the amount of information people are required to hand over to third parties.

Facebook would also look to audit all apps with access to large amounts of data before , he added. Around two weeks after the reports were published, Zuckerberg took out full-page ads in a number of British and American newspapers to apologize for a "breach of trust.

Zuckerberg is scheduled to appear before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees on Tuesday. Rank and file workers have done their part to identify changes to improve our platform but have been actively held back. Can you offer any reason we can expect this to change in the future.

It was a question without a question mark. But for some Facebook employees, the decision to crack down on Trump for inciting violence was comically overdue. Facebook had finally acted, but to many at the company, it was too little, too late. For months, Trump had incited the insurrection—in plain sight, on Facebook.

Facebook has dismissed the concerns of its employees in manifold ways. Adrienne LaFrance: The largest autocracy on Earth. At one point it was acquiring new members every 10 seconds. It soon became one of the fastest-growing groups in Facebook history. Facebook, to its credit, promptly shut down the group.

The movement jumped from one platform to another. And even when the group was removed by Facebook, the platform remained a key hub for people to coordinate the attack on the U. All the while, the movement was encouraged by President Trump, who posted to Facebook and Twitter, sometimes a dozen times a day, his complaint always the same—he won, and Joe Biden lost.

His demand was always the same as well: It was time for his supporters to fight for him and for their country. N ever before in the history of the Justice Department has an investigation been so tangled up with social media. Facebook is omnipresent in the related court documents, woven throughout the stories of how people came to be involved in the riot in the first place, and reappearing in accounts of chaos and bloodshed.

More than people have been charged with crimes in connection to January 6. Taken in aggregate, these court documents from January 6 are themselves a kind of facebook, one filled with selfies posted on Facebook apps over the course of the insurrection.

Helen Lewis: The problem is Facebook. He has pleaded not guilty to all of them. Connell ended up charged with eight federal crimes, and he pleaded not guilty to all of them. All over America, people used Facebook to organize convoys to D. Facebook users shared and reshared messages like this one, which appeared before dawn on Christmas Eve in a Facebook group for the Lebanon Maine Truth Seekers:. This election was stolen and we are being slow walked towards Chinese ownership by an establishment that is treasonous and all too willing to gaslight the public into believing the theft was somehow the will of the people.

Would there be an interest locally in organizing a caravan to Washington DC for the Electoral College vote count on Jan 6th, ? I am arranging the time off and will be a driver if anyone wishes to hitch a ride, or a lead for a caravan of vehicles. If a call went out for able bodies, would there be an answer? Merry Christmas. The post was signed by Kyle Fitzsimons, who was later indicted on charges including attacking police officers on January 6.

Fitzsimons has pleaded not guilty to all eight federal charges against him. Had the organizers tried to plan the rally using other technologies of earlier eras, such as telephones, they would have had to identify and reach out individually to each prospective participant, then persuade them to travel to Washington.

The platform not only helped them recruit participants but offered people a sense of strength in numbers. Facebook proved to be the perfect hype machine for the coup-inclined. One of these people, year-old Kelly Meggs from rural Florida, allegedly participated with his wife in weapons training to prepare for January 6. He called us all to the Capitol and wants us to make it wild!!! Sir Yes Sir!!!

Gentlemen we are heading to DC pack your shit!! Meggs has pleaded not guilty to all charges. His wife, Connie Meggs, has a trial date set for January Before they loaded into an SUV and set out across the country, someone suggested that they take a group photo. Mele has pleaded not guilty to all four charges against him. On January 6, federal prosecutors say, members of the DC Brigade were among the rioters who broke through the final police line, giving the mob access to the West Terrace of the Capitol.

One of the men in the group, Alan Hostetter, a year-old from San Clemente, posted a selfie to his Instagram account, with a crowd of rioters in the background. That war lasted 8 years. We are just getting warmed up.