In addition to ranking posts in people’s News Feed, Facebook is now planning to rank public comments to drive meaningful conversation on the social media platform. With this move, Facebook wants to increase the user’s time spent on the platform which is continuously decreasing from the past couple of years.
Here is how Facebook will rank public comments
Since posts tend to have many comments and to show people relevant and quality comments, Facebook is incorporating integrity signals to promote safe and authentic comments. Thus, if a comment violates Facebook’s Community Standards, Facebook will remove it. The company will also take into account other signals, like engagement-bait, to address the integrity of information and improve the quality of comments people see.
The company has also surveyed to understand the types of comments people want to see including like, react to, or reply to a comment, in order to rank those higher. People can moderate the comments on their post by hiding, deleting, or engaging with comments. Ranking is on by default for Pages and people with a lot of followers, but Pages and people with a lot of followers can choose to turn off comment ranking.
People who don’t have as many followers will not have comment ranking turned on automatically since there are less comments overall, but any person can decide to enable comment ranking by going to their settings.
And to improve relevance and quality, Facebook will start showing comments on public posts more prominently when the comments have interactions from the Page or person who originally posted; or the comments or reactions are from friends of the person who posted.
‘We will continue to take other signals into account so we do not prominently show low-quality comments, even if they are from the person who made the original post or their friends,’ Facebook said in a blog post.
