Facebook allows options on News Feed

Facebook recently announced a subtle update to its News Feed allowing users to choose for themselves which posts and pages appear at the top of their feeds, The Washington Post reported.
“We know that ultimately you’re the only one who truly knows what is most meaningful to you,” product manager Jacob Frantz said in a statement, “and that is why we want to give you more ways to control what you see.”
To try out the new feature, users on iOS (Android and desktop versions are rolling out later) can open “News Feed preferences” and tap “prioritize” to see a list of friends and followed pages whose posts appear in their feed.
Selecting preferred friends puts a star above their photos. Those friends’ posts will then appear above the algorithmically ranked news feed, in their entirety.
This is a pretty significant change from how the news feed works now. Facebook’s home stream is, by all accounts, a pretty mysterious beast: 30 percent of American adults get their news there, according to a recent study, but most don’t understand its mechanisms — or, when it comes to controlling it, their own personal lack of agency.
Facebook uses a slate of factors, including “whom you tend to interact with, and what kinds of content you tend to like and comment on,” to advance the posts that it thinks you’re most likely to read. But users often don’t know quite how their inputs map to Facebook’s outputs. (According to one oft-quoted paper, more than 60 percent of Facebook users don’t even realize that a system algorithmically ranks and filters the posts they see.)
In either case, that’s made the news feed a common target of critics, who argue that it is fundamentally disempowering: While algorithms are helpful in powering much of what we see online, this one makes choices for users without their conscious or considered input.