For once, Meta explains how its algorithms work.
In a post on the company’s blog, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of international affairs, detailed how the algorithms that rank content appearing on user feeds work. He also announced that the social media giant was finally working on tools to better control what we see appearing.
The card system
It’s not really a mystery how Facebook and Instagram’s recommendation algorithms work: the more you interact with a type of content, the more it will be recommended to you. And the more interactions a content generates, the more it will be visible in general. No real surprise there, but Nick Clegg went into a little more detail in the blog post, detailing “ AI systems maps », 22 in number, which classify content in a certain order on user feeds.
Each of these maps represents a unique AI system, constructed differently and taking into account different parameters to predict the content most likely to interest each person. These parameters can for example be the specific characteristics of a publication, the type of reactions that other users have had with it and other similar publications, or even their divisive aspect, or even potentially contrary to the rules of the platforms.
Each of these cards is associated with a type of publication: those of friends, followed pages, sponsored content, advertising. Working in parallel, they then give each post a score, which determines the order in which they appear in a newsfeed.
Personalize your feed, finally!
In addition to detailing how Meta’s algorithms work, Nick Clegg also explained that it will gradually become easier to customize them. First by simply clicking on “Show more” and “Show less” of a post, to pre-chew the work of these AI system cards. But also thanks to a centralized thread control menu available on both platforms, although not really the best indicated.
On top of that, Clegg announced that Meta was working on a new feature on Instagram that made it clear to the Reels recommendation algorithm whether or not one was interested in a type of content.
If Meta explains on this occasion that it reveals the functioning of its algorithm, because it is committed to transparency, the past of the company does not really go in this direction. Unlike the Digital Market Act, a European law coming into force in 2024 and which requires social networks in particular to be more transparent about the operation of their algorithms.
Sources: Engadget, Meta
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