You won’t see all the posts your friends post on Facebook in your timeline. Why is it like that? And who decides which messages you can and cannot see? The consumer program Radar investigated this.
Your “timeline” is the news feed you see when you open Facebook. All posts that you post yourself, that your Facebook friends post, and posts from groups you are in and the pages you follow will appear here.
How does the Facebook timeline work?
If all the posts your friends and the pages you follow on Facebook showed up on your timeline, it would be a massive mess. To prevent this, you will only see posts on your timeline that Facebook thinks are of interest to you, based on your profile.
As a result, you’ll see posts from friends and family, posts your friends have commented on, and posts from groups you’re a member of.
This is how Facebook determines what you see
facebook determines which messages and in which order you will see those messages based on various criteria:
– Your interaction with messages from friends, groups or Pages, prioritizing your friends and family. When you often comment under someone’s posts, his or her posts will end up higher on your timeline.
– Your interaction with the message type. For example, if you watch a lot of videos on Facebook, you will encounter more videos on your timeline. If you mainly read long messages, you will encounter them more often on your timeline.
– The entire interaction around messages. The number of likes, comments, comments, and how often a post is shared determine how “popular” a post is. And if something is popular, Facebook thinks you’ll find it interesting, too, and it ranks higher on your timeline.
– How recently something was posted. Although you sometimes see posts that are a few days old at the top of your timeline, this also plays a role, according to Facebook. When this happens, the above factors will play a larger and/or more important role.
In addition to the factors mentioned above, Facebook points out that there are thousands of other things that go into determining which posts and in what order they appear on your timeline. Varying from the speed of your internet at that moment, to the type of phone you own.
Specific messages
Are you curious about a specific message why you see it? Click on the three dots at the top right of the relevant message and then on ‘Why am I seeing this message?’. Then you will receive more information about this.
Source: Radar
