Web Log: Facebook introduces more newsfeed transparency

Why certain things ended up in your news feed in the order they did has always been a bit of a mystery for Facebook users. Finally, the company has introduced a new feature called "Why am I seeing this post?" to provide more information on the ranking behind posts from friends, pages and groups that end up in your feed.

Tapping on individual posts will allow you to drill down into details to give more context. You will get information on when you became friends with the person or joined the group that created the post, as well as details on how often you interact with them, how often you interact with certain kinds of posts – eg ones with videos or images – and how popular these posts are overall.

Facebook is also adding shortcuts to controls like See First and Unfollow to give users more control over their feed.

"During our research on 'Why am I seeing this post?', people told us that transparency into news feed algorithms wasn't enough without corresponding controls. People wanted to be able to take action, so we've made it easy to manage what you see in news feed right from this feature," said Ramya Sethuraman, product manager, in an official Facebook announcement.