Facebook has just rolled out a new change to its News Feed to give you much more control over what you see.
The biggest change is that you can now select specific Facebook friends and give them priority on your feed.
This means those friends will always appear near the top of your News Feed, and they’ll be marked with a star to remind you that you’ve singled them out.
You can pick up to 30 different accounts to prioritise in your feed; if the cap was any higher, it would start to get a bit pointless.
Greg Marra, Facebook’s News Feed lead, told Mashable that
“The thing we were constantly hearing was: ‘there’s a few people that I really care about and I want to make sure I don’t miss stuff from those people,” explains Marra.
The new option is available in the revamped ‘News Feed Preferences’ menu which you’ll find in the ‘more’ section of the Facebook app.
The revamped News Feed menu
It has four sections that let you control News Feed content, specifically: prioritising friends, unfollowing friends to hide posts, reconnecting with unfollowed friends, and a ‘Discover new Pages’ feature.
All of the new options are available on Facebook’s iOS app right now, with an update set to arrive for desktop and Android “in the coming weeks.”
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The news shouldn’t come as a huge surprise; Facebook balanced its News Feed back in April with the aim of ensuring people are getting more content from their friends rather than from Pages.
At the time, Facebook said: “We’ve learned that people are worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about. For people with many connections, this is particularly important, as there is a lot of content for them to see each day.”
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.