Facebook is Watching What You Read

Facebook screenshot Jan 2015Facebook has been monitoring how users share, like and comment on posts within its News Feed since the feature debuted, using these measurements to shape what content individual users see from their friends, Liked pages and promoted posts.

Now, the social network is tweaking its core algorithm to include how long users linger over posts, taking into account how long you spend reading a shared article or looking at someones holiday photos compared to your average reading patterns.

“Its not as simple as just measuring the number of seconds you spend on each story to understand if that piece of content resonated with you,” said Ansha Yu, software engineer at Facebook in a blog post announcing the change. “Some people may spend ten seconds on a story because they really enjoy it, while others may spend ten seconds on a story because they have a slow internet connection.”

The data on reading habits will not be shared with publishers or advertisers, but because of this, users cannot block Facebook from tracking their reading habits in the same way they can with any information that might be used to target ads.

“The goal of News Feed is to show you the content that matters to you,” said Yu. “Just because someone didnt like, comment or share a story in their News Feed doesnt mean it wasnt meaningful to them. There are times when, for example, people want to see information a serious current event, but dont necessarily want to like or comment on it.”