One of the features Facebook has always been incredibly sneaky about is the order of posts appearing in the News Feed. By default, it’s algorithmic (it’s called Top Stories), meaning Facebook decides the order in which you see posts. This is alright if you trust the company’s machine learning algorithms, but just seeing posts in order in which they appear chronologically has a lot of benefits.
Facebook does offer an option to show the Most Recent stories in the News Feed — it’s tucked away in the Shortcuts menu, possibly under See More — but the setting “eventually” returns to Top Stories. This odd behavior shows how important it is for Facebook to keep showing you stories in the order it chooses, but it’s also incredibly annoying if you’re set on seeing the most recent stories, as there’s no permanent way to turn this feature on. (Notably, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was recently grilled by the U.S. Congress about the way the company’s algorithms work). Read more…
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