Facebook the world’s largest social media platform rolls out a new feature “Why am I seeing this post” in April 2019. Facebook has grown to be one of the best and successful leading social podium globally with a variety of features that delights us and keeps us engaged and active.

But then have you ever noticed that while you open Facebook irritating posts start coming up?

Many have wondered why this happens and few have also tried solving it. Now it is an easy thing to solve.

How does “Why am I seeing this post” work?

This new Facebook tool helps you understand the reason behind how the ranking of posts from friends, pages, and groups takes place on your newsfeed. This is a feature that is built-in to understand the ranking algorithm directly in the app.

This tool was first launched in 2014 as “Why am I seeing this ad?”. After receiving valuable feedback from millions of users over time we understood how important this feature is and since then we have started improving this feature said by Facebook’s product Manager Ramya Sethuraman to help users understand the information about the ads they see.

So, this simply means that you can click on posts and ads in your news feed to see what is showing up and then take the necessary steps to further personalize what you view. This will definitely take the dumb stuff out of the feature and give it a new use.

Let’s dig in a little to know more about this newly built tool on Facebook and how it works.

How to Understand and Control the Posts you see

Newsfeed works just like an algorithm to show you the posts that are most relevant to you. The new feature “Why am I seeing this post” is located in the drop-down menu in the right-hand corner of the post. And it shows an impact in the ranking of the posts in your newsfeed by your past interactions.

 Let’s check out what would you witness specifically

• • You would be able to see what information has the largest effect surrounding the order of the posts and it includes (a) How often you interact with posts from groups, pages or people (b) What is the popularity of the posts you follow shared by  the People, Pages, and Groups and (c) How frequently you interact with specific post’s from people and pages.

• • You can take control of your newsfeed such as See First, Privacy Shortcuts and  News Feed preference in order to customize your news feed.

• •  You will also get to know the popularity of each post compared to others

• • And a special key in this feature is that Facebook would ask if you want to see the posts in your future or not.

• • The feature comes with control options so that you can easily unfollow an individual, a page, a group to no longer receive unwanted posts or content from them.
  • You can also stop seeing posts from someone in case if you don’t want to see any posts from them. Simply just snooze a friend to remove their posts from your feed for at least 30 days and they wouldn’t even know that you don’t want to see their posts. Your next step is to go to the top right corner of one of your friend’s posts and click on the SNOOZE option and your job is done.

Facebook in the past has only sent information about how the advertisers and marketing agencies target users based on their age, gender, interests and website visits. It is becoming transparent eventually and that’s a good initiative because other social platforms like Twitter and Youtube are lacking behind when it comes to letting customers know about how their Algorithm work.

All the users and critics use to criticize the largest social media because of its privacy policies Facebook even tried to interfere in elections, that’s why several scrutinies were run last year to check how data of over 87 million users got improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica for targeting users in time of 2016 presidential election.

Though Mr.Zuckerberg the chief executive officer of Facebook handles it all smartly, he still needs to be careful and be aware of the European Union’s data privacy regulations. The largest social networking platform has been implementing more regulation of the internet on specific issues like restricting terrorist propaganda and hate speeches. Apart from these, new guidelines and laws on cybersecurity are taken on political advertising campaigns online.

Coming to a conclusion

How to Use Facebook’s ‘Why am I seeing this post” article comes to an end here. I hope this feature would really help you eliminate several unwanted posts that keep coming through and save your time and patience. 

Just give it a try before your friend does it.