In a move toward more transparency, Facebook’s parent company Meta has published a comprehensive insight into its social media algorithms. The tech giant also announced features that will allow users to better tailor the recommendation algorithms for their own use.
“This is part of a wider ethos of openness, transparency, and accountability,” said Meta’s President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, in a Thursday blog post.
“With rapid advances taking place with powerful technologies like generative AI, it’s understandable that people are both excited by the possibilities and concerned about the risks,” Clegg wrote. “We believe that the best way to respond to those concerns is with openness.”
Meta’s newfound openness extends toward both the professional and the public spheres.
For the general public, Meta has prepared 22 “system cards,” explaining in layman’s terms how the algorithms rank and select the content that appears in feeds, stories, and reels on its two social media platforms. The system cards are listed in an article called “Our Approach to Explaining Ranking,” which is published on Meta’s Transparency Center.
Meta will also be expanding the “Why Am I Seeing This” feature on both Facebook and Instagram, which explains to the user how previous activity taught the machine-learning AI to select the specific content that it presented to the user.
On the professional side, Meta announced it will begin rolling out a new suite of tools for researchers in the coming weeks, namely Meta’s Content Library and API, in addition to having released over 1,000 AI models, libraries, and data sets for researchers over the last decade.
“We also believe an open approach to research and innovation—especially when it comes to transformative AI technologies—is better than leaving the know-how in the hands of a small number of big tech companies,” Clegg stated.
The Content Library will contain a large amount of public data from Instagram and Facebook, which researchers can explore and filter via approved partners, starting with the University of Michigan’s Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research.
In addition to its move to provide more transparency, Meta is preparing additional ways for users to customize their feed, although the improvements seem minor at first glance.
A new feature on Instagram called “Interested” will be added to the “Not Interested” feature introduced in 2021 to help the algorithms select recommended content. Clegg said that Meta was working to make Facebook’s “Show more/Show Less” feature more prominent.
Users will also have the ability to disable the selection algorithms to receive a chronological feed of the accounts they are following—via the “Feeds” tab on Facebook or by selecting “Following” on Instagram.
Clegg said he hoped these efforts would “challenge the myth that algorithms leave people powerless over the content they see” and “help us meet new data-sharing and transparency compliance obligations”—the latter potentially the major motivating factor behind Meta’s decision in favor of more openness.
The explosive development of AI has caught the attention of regulators worldwide in recent months over concerns about the great ease with which these systems can process and analyze large amounts of information.