2021 - Facebook Hides Newsfeed Controls....Again!

How to Reset Your Facebook Newsfeed to See All Your Friends Uncensored.

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.

I on the other hand, live on the hidden island of the "Most Recent" Facebook newsfeed where I see the whole glorious flood of posts by my thousand some-odd friends. And you can too!  There are two ways to fix it so you see everyone and at the same time confound Facebook's Department of Acceptable Content Moderation.

#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.

I found a December 2020 article in Distractify that  explained how to reset your newsfeed after the 2020 "update' of Facebook. After 'splaining how to reset the newsfeed, the author noted, "...If you're finding yourself unable to find the option on the next update, chances are, following the same above steps will bring you back to the function. The order may change, and the icon, but hopefully, it won't ever disappear for good." Well in Mark Zuckerberg's plans for a dystopian social media future, hopefully didn't happen. The December procedure doesn't work anymore. Apparently it was too intuitive and people could still figure out how to get uncensored content.

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

 

 

Stop Social Media Bullying NOW!

If you "do" Facebook or other social media sites you'll recognize the species of message that I'm talking about here.  You may have "shared" one or posted an original one following the same formula.  Have you ever posted something that says something like this:

• "Are you against (insert something awful here)?  I bet 50% of you don't care enough to repost this."? 

It might say 99% of you (my cold-hearted friends) won't care enough about this awful thing to take the time to share it with your 1,788 Facebook friends. Whatever it says, if it ends in a guilt trip trying to induce you to fill up other people's email boxes or Facebook pages with endless versions of this stuff, it's a form of bullying. In essence, the underlying message says, "Do this or you're not my friend" or "Do this or you're not a good person", "Do this or you aren't one of the cool people" or one of the more specific versions -- "Do this or you don't love Jesus."

Any way you share these sorts of messages, it's little short of playground bullying. I don't mind if you ask em to share, but don't try to lay a guilt trip on me. It works with people who are desperate to have friends or to belong to a certain set of cool people.

Me, I'm suspicious of any group that would start something like this that resorts to intimidation to get people to do things for them. Of course, many Facebookers wouldn't understand that if they happened to be one of the cool kids or one of the several garden variety bullies back there on the playground. To bullies and their terrified toadies it would simply seem like an effective marketing tool.

I recognize the technique.  I was the kid with the broken horn-rimmed glasses with tape on the bridge who made good grades that the Neanderthal's who worked for the cool kids liked to stuff in lockers.  I was a target K-10.

What really blows me away is that one of these posts is running around on Facebook intimidating people in order to get them to pass along a post that says they "hate" bullying. The last paragraph suggests that only a cold-hearted bully wouldn't "share" the post with everyone on their friend's list. Many people pass it along from guilt. Who wants your friends to know you don't hate bullying after all?

The problem is that they're just surrendering to another kind of bullying when they hit that "share" button. When they do that, it only encourages social media bullying to continue.

Let me tell suggest a response to this kind of bullying. Just stop passing this stuff along. It's bullying plain and simple. It's like saying, "If you hate annoying Facebook posts, share this with all your friends!" 

Let me suggest another strategy. If you really hate bullying, don't share this kind of stuff. Jesus will still love you. Pass along this post instead. No pressure. You don't have to. You won't get bad luck if you don't.  Angels won't deflate your car tires and you will not develop genital warts!

Plenty of good people don't want to pass this stuff along and shouldn't be made to feel bad about it if they don't.  It's a big time suck and a huge waste of time. In what way will a Facebook post put a stop to bullying? Besides, few of your friends will "like" a post like this one and fewer yet will pass it along. The response will likely be underwhelming without all the tacked-on guilt!

Besides, it's enough to simply not pass this kind of stuff along. It does no good and only reinforces knuckling under to social bullies.

As Mrs. Reagan used to say,  "JUST SAY NO!"

Tom King © 2013