Facebook "suggested" pages

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Please tell me it's not just me who gets politically repulsive "suggested" pages being suggested in the space to the right of the main feed, of a nature pretty much 180 degrees opposite to everything I say, like or link on FB. Either FB's algorithm is defective, or the scum who favour those sites are paying to have them promoted. Is there anything one can do about it?

[delicatemoth]

Facebook "suggested" pages

It's not just you. When I was on FB I had a transphobic hate page recommended to me. I presumed it was because it had 'Trans' in the name, so the algorithm 'thought' that because I liked other pages with 'Trans' in the name, I might like this one.

Only thing you can really do is report it. You'll get the standard "We are investigating..." reply, and FB are unlikely to do anything about it unless they get multiple reports, so it might be worth enlisting your friends to report too.

[Gerontophile]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Jesse Eisenberg is in London. Go and kick the shit out of him.

[Incandenza]

Facebook "suggested" pages

A few days back, it suggested a Donald Trump fan page, and a Liverpool/Shankly themed page for me.

[Furtho]

Facebook "suggested" pages

The Facebook Purity browser extension enables you to screen out all of this sort of stuff.

[San Bernardhinault]

Facebook "suggested" pages

It has recently suggested "Britain out of Europe" and "To Hell With Political Correctness" for me. Because, presumably, the algorithm is designed by software engineers who enjoy trying to wind us up

[Gerontophile]

Facebook "suggested" pages

gérontophile wrote: Jesse Eisenberg is in London. Go and kick the shit out of him.

I should probably put a disclaimer here, to all NSA who are 'listening', that this is a joke.

I like Jesse Eisenberg. I realise he is not Mark Zuckerberg, whom none of us will ever have the chance of kicking the shit out of.

[Knowlesy]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Does it depend on what your friends like, perhaps?

I will see what happens now I have removed all the bigots from my list these past few days.

[hobbes]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Nah. I stripped out the outers a couple of weeks ago (there were only 2) and I still get a load of fascism pop up.

[ad hoc]

Facebook "suggested" pages

It's got worse lately. I used to get suggested pages which I could see where they came from (even if I had no interest in them), but the last couple of weeks I've been getting loads of of openly right wing pro-Brexit shit

[Wouter D]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Well, these recommender systems are hard to do well. The problem is that there are far too many niche Facebook pages available to suggest, and far too little information about them.

Maybe all of your 500 friends have each liked three of these pages, and you like three more. That gives Facebook information on at most 1503 pages, but it has to choose a page to recommend out of all the pages available, the amount of which runs in the millions. So on the vast majority of the pages, Facebook knows nothing in relation to you. On the tiny minority of which Facebook does know something, the information might be conflicting (some friends like Arsenal, some like Spurs), perpendicular (some friends like a particular band, some friends like a particular brand of coffee machine, what does this tell me about movie preferences?), or too general to be of any use. It is very hard to give reasonable recommendations based on this small amount of fuzzy information.

So the practical upshot is that the recommender system will look beyond what your friends say, and also recommend pages that have seen a spike in interest of the general audience. If loads of people like it, you might like it too. This will annoy a decent chunk of people, but with other people it will succeed more often than micromanaged page recommendations. The OP observations seem a direct consequence of this recommendation behavior.

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Evariste Euler Gauss wrote: Please tell me it's not just me who gets politically repulsive "suggested" pages being suggested in the space to the right of the main feed, of a nature pretty much 180 degrees opposite to everything I say, like or link on FB. Either FB's algorithm is defective, or the scum who favour those sites are paying to have them promoted. Is there anything one can do about it?

No, it's not you. I get loads of far-right stuff popping up, most recently this:

[Bizarre Löw Triangle]

Facebook "suggested" pages

It's not the only way facebook allows far-right propaganda to spread.

I keep getting stuff popping up from Britain First (or similar) because friends (or even, occasionally, friends of friends) had commented negatively on something their friends had shared.

So the reach of a person with 200 friends sharing a Britain First post is potentially millions of people.

[Muukalainen]

Facebook "suggested" pages

I started getting (or, at least, I started noticing that I was getting) these right wing suggested pages only very recently, perhaps only since the referendum. They're all English language too, nothing in Finnish though these surely exist too. Most of my (not very many) FB friends are Finns, so there's no shortage of Finnish language suggested pages, but none of them are remotely related to right wing propaganda.

However, I do frequent the Guardian website and have been following the referendum closely during campaigning, the results and the aftermath, and I've been presuming that it's been down to regular browsing of those pages.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Facebook "suggested" pages

You can remove suggestions you don't like; presumably Facebook's algorithms will take this into account when it serves you adverts and suggestions.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Facebook "suggested" pages

How do you do that? The only actions it seems to offer me are a "like page" button (the opposite of what I'd want to do), a "see all" option which brings up a page full of irrelevant pages, mainly dross, with no obvious pruning menu, and to click on the offensive page itself. Do I need to do that last thing in order to remove it as a suggestion? I'm not sure I could do that, I would feel dirty going near it.

[Wouter D]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Evariste Euler Gauss wrote: How do you do that? The only actions it seems to offer me are a "like page" button (the opposite of what I'd want to do), a "see all" option which brings up a page full of irrelevant pages, mainly dross, with no obvious pruning menu, and to click on the offensive page itself. Do I need to do that last thing in order to remove it as a suggestion? I'm not sure I could do that, I would feel dirty going near it.

Depends on whether you view the web version or the app version of Facebook. In the web version, if you hover your mouse over the suggested page, does a cross button appear in the top right corner? If so, clicking on it will make the page disappear.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Facebook "suggested" pages

@EEG

In the main feed, there's a little down arrow at the top-right of each advert (or suggested content). You can select the option to hide it.

[Muukalainen]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Click on the pull down menu immediately to the right of the "Like Page" button. The top option says to hide the advert, so I presume it's that. You'll get something else in its place, I don't know of any way of getting rid of them altogether, and I presume that there isn't.

[Furtho]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Ahem.

Furtho wrote: The Facebook Purity browser extension enables you to screen out all of this sort of stuff.

[Muukalainen]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Hah, way too slow, and wrong about the last bit anyway.

[Gangster Octopus]

Facebook "suggested" pages

Suggested: Highland Retreat in Lincolnshire...

Que?

[Sam]

Facebook "suggested" pages

What Furtho said, or Social Fixer which does a similar job and allows you to customise what Facebook looks like in your browser. I couldn't tell you what pages Facebook is recommending to me, because I never see them.