Likes, anger emojis and RSVPs: the math behind Facebook’s News Feed — and how it backfired

CNN Business — In late 2017, Facebook had a big problem: users were commenting on, “liking” and resharing posts less than they had in the past. That December, other internal documents show, the company quickly came up with a plan: it would refocus its News Feed algorithm on a new metric it referred to as “meaningful social interactions”, or MSI, for ranking people’s interactions on Facebook. A Facebook spokeswoman told CNN Business that the introduction of MSI wasn’t a “sea change” in how the company ranked users’ activity on the social network, as it previously considered likes, comments, and shares as part of its ranking. By the end of September that year, the document said, Facebook had identified 11 countries where it used a “more balanced strategy” of MSI plus “appropriate amounts of video.” The note also pointed out that “the dynamics of Feed are changing constantly”, and in early 2019 the company’s ranking team concluded that optimizing for MSI “was no longer an effective tactic for growing sessions”; public-content ranking, it said was a “better strategy”. Changes were made to MSI numerous times after its launch, such as in early and late 2020; the Facebook spokeswoman said the formula behind it is “continually updated and refined based on new research and direct feedback from users.” A post in an internal employee group on September 15 of that year forecast changes planned for around October 1 intended “to make MSI capture more useful interactions.” These included filtering out some so-called “bad interactions,” such as deleted comments and single-character comments, and rejiggering the weights associated with reaction icons.