There’s a Facebook hoax making the rounds that has forced the world’s largest social network to respond.
Late last year, a post hit the social network claiming that Facebook was limiting the updates in your News Feed to posts from just 26 of your friends. The post blamed it on an algorithm change Facebook made that “chooses the people” in the News Feed. Subsequent posts said the limit was 25 people.
At the time, according to a listing on Snopes, a site that aims at verifying or busting myths, it didn’t gain much traction. But after Facebook announced an algorithm change in January that would reduce the amount of times you’d see content from certain news publishers, it picked up steam. And an increasing number of people at least wondered, and at worst, believed, that they could only see content from two dozen of their friends.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day’s technology newsletter
Snopes, which published its findings on Tuesday, investigated and discovered that the claims were false and there is no way to know exactly what Facebook’s algorithms do. Others that take some time to simply count updates from unique friends in their News Feeds can likely come to the same conclusion rather quickly.
Still, Snopes reached out to Facebook, which told the site that the post is false. And that should be that.
“Friends don’t let friends copy and paste memes, and this one simply is not true,” a Facebook spokesperson told Coins2Day in a statement. “We rank News Feed based on how relevant each post might be to you, and while we’ve made some updates that could increase the number of posts you see from your friends, your News Feed isn’t limited to 25 of them.”
