Three ways Facebook decides what goes in your news feed

This week Facebook is holding its regular F8 conference where it shows off new products and gizmos to developers from around the world.

At one of the talks held at the event in San Francisco, some of the social network's senior staff revealed a few of the secrets behind how it decides what goes into a user's news feed.

While the Facebook Help Centre explains:

The stories that show in your news feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook. This helps you to see more stories that interest you from friends you interact with the most.

Forbes' Robert Hof reports that Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox and product director Adam Mosseri went beyond that basic description.

According to Mosseri, the company uses three "major buckets" of data in order to give what Cox describes as "20 things that really matter every day" to each of the network's one billion users.

• How you interact with specific friends

• The type of content you interact with - if you like more photos than videos then you are likely to see more photos in future

• The activity on posts - for instance, photos featuring people you interact with often or posts in which those people have commented are more likely to show higher up

Facebook has also been using testers to rank the type of content they want to see on a scale of 1-5. This has helped them weed out more unpopular content like click-bait posts, hoax news stories and advertorials which used to appear prominently.

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