Introducing More Control for People and Brands in News Feed

Our Community Standards are in place to help keep the platform safe by defining what is and is not allowed in our community, but that doesn’t mean everyone is interested in seeing or appearing next to the same content.

Today, we’re introducing a number of controls designed to give people and businesses the ability to tailor their News Feed experience. We are also announcing plans to collaborate with third-party partners to develop a brand suitability verification tool for News Feed.

Testing New Ways for People to Control and Customize News Feed

We’re testing new ways to make it easier to find and use News Feed controls to adjust people’s ranking preferences and customize their News Feed. As part of this, people can now increase or reduce the amount of content they see from the friends, family, Groups and Pages they’re connected to and the topics they care about in their News Feed Preferences.

We’re also making existing controls easier to access, including Favorites, Snooze, Unfollow and Reconnect. We’ll begin testing in countries around the world to a small percentage of people, gradually expanding in the coming weeks. This is part of our ongoing work to give people more control over News Feed, so they see more of what they want and less of what they don’t. We’ll continue to share our progress as we test and learn.

Expanding News Feed Controls for Businesses

Soon, we are expanding the Topic Exclusion controls for News Feed test to a limited number of advertisers that run ads in English. The advertiser topic exclusion control allows an advertiser to select a topic to help define how we’ll show the ad on Facebook, including News Feed. Advertisers can select three topics - News and Politics, Social Issues, and Crime & Tragedy. When an advertiser selects one or more topics, their ad will not be delivered to people recently engaging with those topics in their News Feed. In our early testing with advertisers, we found that advertisers that:

• Excluded the News and Politics categories were able to avoid News and Political adjacency 94% of the time.
• Excluded the Tragedy and Conflict categories were able to avoid Tragedy and Conflict adjacency 99% of the time.
• Excluded the Debated Social Issues categories were able to avoid Debated Social Issues adjacency 95% of the time.¹

People using our apps can manage the ways advertisers are able to reach them in Ads Preferences. This includes whether or not they are included in the three topics for Topic Exclusion controls for News Feed.

From our conversations with the industry, we know that this solution may not solve the needs of every advertiser and that some advertisers are looking for content-level granularity.

We see this product as a bridge between what we can offer today and where we hope to go — content-based controls. We will soon begin exploring and testing a new content-based suitability control that will aim to address concerns advertisers have of their ads appearing in Facebook and Instagram feeds next to certain topics based on their brand suitability preferences. We aim to design our exploration in line with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) Suitability Framework.

We expect to kick off in 2022 and provide updates along the way starting in Q1.

Collaborating with the Industry for Placement Verification in Feed

Before the end of the year, we also plan to collaborate with third-party brand safety partners to develop a solution to verify whether content adjacent to an ad in News Feed aligns with a brand’s suitability preferences. We'll start with a request for proposals in the coming weeks.

We will share our progress working with the industry on these initiatives as they develop.