My friends will say stuff like, “I saw this news story on Facebook.” How does this work? I’m not on Facebook.
When you go to your page, do you find headlines in a sidebar or something? If so, I’m guessing everyone doesn’t get the same stories-- how does Facebook decide what headlines to show you? Or do you see headlines that one of your FB friends has forwarded to you? Someone 'splain it to me, please.
This. I see stories other people posted. If I’m interested, I do an independent search outside of FB to ensure the article is legit. (e.g., This morning I saw a ‘news report’ that John Amos had died. By the time I searched – and found nothing – the posted had removed the post.)
On the right side of the page is a list called “Trending” and it has popular stories that people are posting. It might say 4000 people are talking about John Amos, and 2400 people are talking about Carrie Fisher, or whatever. If you click on one of those links, it takes you to a page of links about that person so you can check for yourself how trustworthy the news seems to be.
Then, of course, people post newws stories constantly. The stories can come from reliable sites or from crappy ones. Again, it’s up to you to decide if the site is reliable or not, and to check the story.
So many people will post or share anything, so before I comment or whatever, I check it out myself.
But those are the two ways I get news from facebook, and you’d be amazed about how quickly news can spread!
Yep, you have your own ‘feed’ which comprises a stream of posts originating, one way or another, from the people you are ‘friends’ with. Some people post family photos others political stuff.
There are secondary ways to see content via sidebars, as well
Because most people are Facebook ‘friends’ with people like themselves, your feed becomes what is now called an echo chamber - in other words you don’t see opposing news items or idea or whatever, just what People Like Us ‘like’.
I’m guessing you get those news feeds when your FB friends click the Facebook button on the page of an article they’re reading?
You can also “like” news pages and get somewhat up to date news that way. I have all 4 local news stations and 1 of the local newspapers showing articles on my newsfeed. I read them to shake my head at the comments and then go to google for better info (one of the stations is getting really bad about sharing videos from around the country with maybe 2 sentences thrown on the page describing the “news”.)
You may want to try and educate them that false news stories have been posted on Facebook by foreign governments.
That they are best to get their news from mainstream media like CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, BBC, UK Guardian, ABC, CBS, NBC, USA Today, CBC Canada, Wall Street Journal, etc.
Although it may be a hopeless cause!
You should be able to click the FB posts to go directly to the actual webpage of the news organization, but generally fewer than 5% of those who see an item on Facebook actually click through.
Note also that you’re probably only seeing 10 percent of the posts by any of those news organizations.
In short: relying on Facebook for news is a terrible idea if you actually want to be informed.
To clarify: when you “like” a story on the page of some media outlet, that outlet automatically starts forwarding stories to your FB page?
So you get news headlines on your personal FB page BESIDES headlines that are there because your friends “liked” them somewhere else? How would a “foreign government” or fake news outlet target your FB page? I’m confused.
This is what I’m thinking. It appalls me just a little when I scour a variety of original news sites every day and read extensively, and then my (I thought) well-educated friends will only ever say, “I saw <whatever> on FB.” My thought is, your news is being filtered…either by Facebook or by the interests of the people on your friends list. <shrug> But that’s just me.
With the slanting of the main media outlets all across the board, I don’t believe any three or two together if they are of the same slant.
The local news video of the house fire I figure really is happening or happened in the previous year depending on how hard it is to get a live reporter on scene fast enough for the 6PM news. I believe that there was a fire but names, addresses, etc., Not so much.
The bigger the outlet, the bigger the lies… IMO
No, you have to “like” the page of that media outlet and not just a story from it. You might also have to set the preferences for that page as found under “following”. And it doesn’t go to my FB Wall it goes on to the Newsfeed. My friends only see what I “like” and Share.
I have “liked” several magazines and newspapers and the posts for those magazines and newspapers show up on my news feed when the FB algorithm thinks I will be interested in them.
This is the majority of the news I get through Facebook. Of course, I also see news stories posted by my friends, but that’s a minority of the news on my feed.
Just to be clear, news articles on your news feed appear in the same way that status updates from your friends appear. You just go down the news feed and it will show you what it thinks you want to see. If you want to see everything posted by a friend or a non-human source, like a newspaper, you go to their timelines.
Just one more question: what is the difference between FB wall and timeline?
What used to be called the wall is now called the timeline.
The two main features of Facebook are your news feed and the timeline.
The news feed is the list of things that your friends have posted. This is the main thing you see when you open Facebook.
Your timeline shows you what you have posted (and what others have posted specifically to your timeline).
They’re regular web links to news sites your friends share (or pages you follow – celebrities, discussion groups like the Straight Dope, random “pages” like “Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash”, etc). They show up in your “feed”, which used to be a strict chronological timeline of things shared by people and pages you followed, but which is now a quasi-chronological list of things the Facebook algorithm thinks you will like chosen from among those friends and pages.
Yeah, even when you set it to ‘Most Recent’ it doesn’t show you everything.
Facebook, in general, is a lot like plain old email. You maintain a list of people and organizations you would like to see content from, and when you open up the app or website, you get a list of things people have “shared”, which is like broadcasting an email to your entire address book. A good majority of those “emails”, AKA “posts” contain links, or photos, or both.
Then there are tools on top of that to hide or unfollow people so you don’t see their annoying shit everyday in your inbox. And conversely to make smaller groups so that you can share content with your close friends, for example, without unwittingly sending grandma pictures of you drunkenly dry humping that stripper.
Basically, if you don’t read Facebook, you can replace “I heard it on Facebook” with “my friend emailed me a link to this story” (or worse and unfortunately more common, “my friend emailed me a picture with this text on it”), and get the same gist.
Thanks, y’all. Ignorance fought.