Does the New Facebook Algorithm Only Show You 26 Friends?

Facebook hasn’t limited your feed to only a certain number of people

(and sharing a post won’t trick its algorithms)

The truth is that no one seems to know exactly how Facebook’s algorithms work. In 2016, Slate.com described the manner in which the social media network determines the order of content in any feed as “surprisingly inelegant, maddeningly mercurial, and stubbornly opaque.” An 11 January 2018 Facebook blog post addressed changes to the service:

Today we use signals like how many people react to, comment on or share posts to determine how high they appear in News Feed.

With this update, we will also prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. To do this, we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about, and show these posts higher in feed. These are posts that inspire back-and-forth discussion in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to — whether that’s a post from a friend seeking advice, a friend asking for recommendations for a trip, or a news article or video prompting lots of discussion.

We will also prioritize posts from friends and family over public content, consistent with our News Feed values.

However, these changes explicitly affect businesses and publishers, not individual friends and family members, and the only disclosures made about the changes were that they were intended to increase, not decrease, interactions with individuals. An embedded post published by founder Mark Zuckerberg elaborated:

But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other … Since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in News Feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do — help us connect with each other.