Facebook squashes myth that News Feed only shows posts from 26 people

Image: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Facebook does not limit your News Feed to show posts from only 26 of your friends. 

While the idea that Facebook would limit its Feed like that sounds odd in the first place, it is a meme that’s been making the rounds for over a year, and now Facebook has officially said it isn’t true. 

If you’ve never seen the meme, here’s an example that I’ve easily found using Facebook’s search (with the user’s name cropped out). It claims that Facebook has a new algorithm which only shows posts from the “same few people,” and that the way to fix it is to leave a comment or a sticker under the post, in order to make the poster appear in the commenters’ Feeds. 

Image: stan Schroeder/FacebooK/Mashable

In a blog post published Wednesday, Facebook made it quite clear that this is not the case. 

“No, Facebook does not set a limit on the number of people whose posts are shown in your News Feed,” the post said. Ramya Sethuraman, a product manager who works on ranking at Facebook, elaborated further. “The goal of News Feed is to show you the posts that matter to you so that you have an enjoyable experience. If we somehow blocked you from seeing content from everyone but a small set of your friends, odds are you wouldn’t return,” he said in a statement.

But there’s a reason why this myth persists, Facebook claims. “The posts in your News Feed are ranked in the order we believe you’ll be most interested in seeing them,” the post explains. And because of this, “it’s possible that you’ll see content from a similar list of posters at the top of your News Feed, which can make the “26 friends” idea seem plausible.”

So all you really need to do to dispel this myth is very simple: keep scrolling. 

The other part of the meme has “a grain of truth” in it as well, Facebook says. While leaving a comment or a like won’t “unblock” you from showing up in your friends’ Feeds, trading comments with friends makes you more active, thus prompting Facebook’s algorithms to show your posts higher in your friends’ Feeds.