Does Facebook feed show you everything? Washington Post’s Tim Herrera thinks NO!

by editor

 

On July 17, Tim Herrera spent six hours scrolling through his Facebook News Feed.

What may sound like procrastination or killing time was actually Herrera’s own experiment to understand Facebook’s News Feed algorithm.

Herrera went through and noted all of the July 17 status updates and posts made by his 403 Facebook friends and the 157 Pages he likes. After crunching the numbers, Herrera realized he’d only seen 738 of the 2,593 new updates created by his connections that day—roughly 29% of the day’s activity. 

“Considering the average U.S. user spends around 40 minutes on Facebook per day – or about one-tenth of the time I spent in my News Feed – it’s easy to imagine that percentage dipping far, far below my 29%,” he said. Read more  in his analysis of the News Feed experiment.