Facebook really doesn't want to let all that research they did with the US government back in the Obama administration go to waste. There was a study Zuckerberg et al were caught doing some years back in which they screened the posts that Facebook members were receiving. The idea was to find out whether screening out angry conservative posts from members, made the more passive and receptive to the calming and enlightened progressive messages they put in their place.
First Facebook rigged their newsfeed setting so that every two days or so, everybody's newsfeed switched back to the "Top Stories" setting. If you will notice, your more provocative (and entertaining) friends get censored in favor of more progressive content and screens out more stimulating conservative content. And very recently, they changed the procedure for switching your newsfeed back to "Most Recent" so that most people have a hard time figuring out how to get back to where they see their friends' posts again. Facebook is clearly using this quiet resetting of your newsfeed to calm you down and manipulate your emotions and make you more peaceful and receptive to the message Mr. Zuckerberg thinks you ought to be seeing.
The "Top Stories" setting on Facebook is simply private corporate censorship and since Facebook is clearly a left-leaning corporate entity, it's also, in essence, censorship if content not approved by the Democrat Party. Fortunately, you can still switch your newsfeed so that you can once again get those posts from your grandpa complaining about how Joe Biden and that Pelosi woman are ruining the country. To be fair, Facebook also does censor ax murderers, the more open sorts of terrorists and most pornography. They don't trust their members to unfriend such people and, of course, conservatives like me get lumped in with pedophiles, serial killers, mass murderers and Ted Cruz and screened out of my friends' newsfeeds.
#1. The Easy Way - To make sure Facebook doesn't switch you to their heavily censored "Top Stories" newsfeed setting, download an app that Facebook doesn't like called "Facebook Purity". Just click on the link I just gave you and download the app. Once installed you can just click on FBP icon the program places at the top of your Facebook pages and you have control over Facebook at your fingertips. You'll have to update it a few times a year as Facebook generally eliminates FBP's access every time they update. Fortunately, the developer is never far behind in updating the app so you get it back in short order. I toss the guy a few bucks once in a while to support his efforts.
#2 The Hard Way - The Newsfeed link in the left column on the Home newsfeed page is now disabled. The other links work, but you can't click on Newsfeed like you used to and change the setting. You have to follow a more convoluted and distinctly unintuitive process. And frankly, I can't find anyone on the Internet who has figured out the new system for changing your newsfeed back to Most Recent. Using Facebook these days is like revisiting the Soviet Union or George Orwell's fictional Oceania where control over the proletariat is maintained by eliminating or redefining words, rewriting history or making it impossible to do things that might stimulate actual thinking which might lead to discontent which might lead to a revolt against the oligarchy.
So for now, see #1, because since the last time I changed my newsfeed manually, they eliminated the button that does so and substituted a button that doesn't work. For now FBP is the only way to reset your newsfeed.
One thing nice about having to use Facebook Purity is that it gives you some other great controls for managing what Facebook tosses across your screen. You can block things, improve the looks of your page and other fun stuff. So for now, until someone finds the secret door to changing your newsfeed, downloading FBP seems to be our only solution.
You know, Orwell's 1984 was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual for America's would-be oligarchy.
© 2021 by Tom King
