The Problem with Facebook: “It’s Keeping Things From You”

You liked our Face­book page. Now you’re expect­ing to see our mate­r­i­al in your Face­book news feed. It’s not an unrea­son­able expec­ta­tion. But it’s also very unlike­ly to hap­pen. As Derek Muller, the cura­tor of sci­ence video blog Ver­i­ta­si­um, explains very artic­u­late­ly in the video above, “The prob­lem with Face­book is that it’s keep­ing things from you. You don’t see most of what’s post­ed by your friends or the pages you fol­low.” And that’s part­ly because, Muller goes on to explain, Face­book is over­whelmed by con­tent, and busy try­ing to find ways to mon­e­tize its news­feed. Fol­low­ing a change to an algo­rithm in Decem­ber, the prob­lem has only got­ten worse. (We have 245,000 fol­low­ers, and maybe 7,000 — or 2% — see a post on aver­age in Jan­u­ary, as com­pared to 30,000 in Novem­ber.) If you care about how you use Face­book — either to con­nect with friends, or gath­er infor­ma­tion — the video is well worth watch­ing. It clear­ly lets you know that Face­book is con­trol­ling your social media expe­ri­ence, when it should be you.

Note: If you want to make sure you receive all of our posts, get our dai­ly email or sign up for our RSS feed. Face­book does­n’t con­trol those … yet.

You can read more about this issue at Slate.