Choose what appears on your Facebook News Feed

Hate to see all those viral posts that keep popping up on your news feed in Facebook? Now you can choose what you want to see on your News Feed as Facebook is adjusting its algorithm once again.

This time, the popular social networking site wants to make it easier for people to ignore the viral posts that may appear in their feeds, reports Mashable.

Facebook has been collecting feedbacks of its users from "story surveys", a feature which surfaced to tens of thousands of users a day, asking them to choose between two viral stories.

"With this update, if a significant amount of people tell us they would prefer to see other posts more than that particular viral post, we'll take that into account when ranking, so that viral post might show up lower in people's feeds in the future, since it might not actually be interesting to people," Facebook explains the changes in a "News Feed FYI" post.

Facebook has been collecting feedbacks of its users from “story surveys”, a feature which surfaced to tens of thousands of users a day, asking them to choose between two viral stories. Photo taken from Mashable.

The change is likely to affect hoax stories, which are often shared a lot and receive a lot of comments, which typically appear higher in a users' News Feed since the number of shares and comments are taken into account by its ranking algorithm, Facebook notes.

With the update, this may no longer be the case, Facebook says, adding that if "the majority" of survey responses act unfavorably toward the story, then it will appear lower down, even if it has many likes and shares.

This isn't the first time Facebook has tried to adjust its News Feed to prevent hoaxes. Earlier this year, the social media added a new feature that allows people to mark posts as false. A post marked as false by enough people would appear less often in News Feed and will include a warning about it being reported by users for containing false information.

However, the change is not expected to have a big impact on publishers since "viral posts are typically anomalies, and not an important part of distribution for Pages," Facebook further says, adding that the settings will remain unchanged if users respond favorably in surveys.