21 Comments
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J C's avatar

We all have this issue on FB.

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Kristin Newton's avatar

Threads is the same. It’s just becoming garbage.

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Steve Pottinger's avatar

Yep. All of that. FB is utterly pointless now, and BlueSky and Substack are much, much better options.

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Paul Smyth's avatar

This is currently driving me nut. I'm hiding every page it pushes on me like this. It's not like these are typical algorithm pages either because a lot of them are either completely irrelevant to anything I do or view or they go completely against my likes and takes. A lot of right wing pages being pushed lately

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Liz Thompson's avatar

Yes, they certainly do spread the rubbish about

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Quin Sausage's avatar

To limit your Facebook feed to only show posts from people you follow, you can adjust your News Feed preferences. Here's how you can do it:

On Desktop:

Log in to Facebook: Go to Facebook.com and log in to your account.

Access News Feed Preferences:

Click on the three horizontal lines (menu) in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Scroll down and click on Settings & Privacy.

Then, click on News Feed Preferences.

Prioritize Who to See First:

In the News Feed Preferences menu, click on Prioritize who to see first.

Select the friends or pages you want to see at the top of your feed.

Unfollow People to Hide Their Posts:

In the same News Feed Preferences menu, click on Unfollow people to hide their posts.

You can unfollow friends or pages whose posts you don’t want to see in your feed. This won’t unfriend them, but their posts won’t appear in your feed.

On Mobile (iOS/Android):

Open the Facebook App: Launch the Facebook app on your device.

Access News Feed Preferences:

Tap on the three horizontal lines (menu) in the bottom right corner (iOS) or top right corner (Android).

Scroll down and tap on Settings & Privacy.

Then, tap on News Feed Preferences.

Prioritize Who to See First:

Tap on Prioritize who to see first.

Select the friends or pages you want to see at the top of your feed.

Unfollow People to Hide Their Posts:

Tap on Unfollow people to hide their posts.

Unfollow friends or pages whose posts you don’t want to see in your feed.

Additional Tips:

Snooze: If you want to temporarily hide someone’s posts, you can snooze them for 30 days. Click on the three dots in the top right corner of a post and select Snooze [Name] for 30 days.

Favorites: You can also create a "Favorites" list to prioritize certain friends or pages.

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Neil Anderson's avatar

Agreed, though my experience of bluesky was that it's full of transgender ideology slop.

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Thomas Cleary's avatar

Exactly. I don’t read any news on FB. Even some of their archaeological sites are highly questionable, as though anything ancient and sophisticated must have been developed to extraterrestrials.

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Tom's avatar

I deleted the app before Christmas because I was fed up with exactly this. I only log in once a day on my computer now to see if I've been tagged in any local groups for work opportunities.

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Robert's avatar

Interesting, but I'm not seeing any right-wing or extremist content at all (except liberal/Dem stuff). I follow a Leonard Peltier page but now get swamped with Native American history pages, one day I got 8 different pages with the same Elvis photo. The leftist/independent media I follow get drowned out by the spam but I've seen no increase in extremist content whatsoever. It's the same on Twitter for me.

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gill's avatar

Driving me crazy too. Seems to be spending ages blocking the bar stewards. My guess is they are paying to push these sites, or they are bots

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Bev's avatar

I am wondering now what you can and can’t believe on Facebook….seems like Trump, Musk and the rest of the billionaires just want you to believe what crap they put out!!

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John Harris's avatar

I've stopped using Facebook. Unfortunately I'm locked in by work. I need to have a Facebook account to keep ownership of the work page, most communication it's done in WhatsApp and I can't force the entire rest of the business to use something else

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St. Lydia of the Kinfe's avatar

OK. Now why not try the Fediverse - which is decentralised and not owned by single entities and was created on the ethos of the Free Software Movement?

Because BlueSky will go the same way, and so will Substack, because these platforms always enshittify in the end.

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Andy Chapman's avatar

I have also found the that blocking no longer works. I will use the “I don’t want to see this” menu to say I never had want to see a page or account and it will continue to appear on subsequent days. I can tell (it could have been a duplicate name) because the block option is already selected when I go to block it again.

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John Wright's avatar

They said that Facebook was deliberately collecting your data to target ads to you, but just looking at the stream of garbage, that clearly isn't the case. Clearly, the algorithm has been trained for a different purpose.

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