In an effort to make public post comments more meaningful, Facebook is updating the factors that determine how comments are ranked on public posts.
In addition to ranking posts in News Feed, Facebook also ranks comments on posts to show people ones that are more relevant to them, in-turn promoting meaningful conversations on its platform. This week, Facebook is updating its comment ranking factors to further improve both the relevance and the quality of comments and conversations.
Facebook ranks comments on public posts from Pages and people who have many followers, as these posts tend to have many comments. It ranks these comments according to several considerations:
Integrity signals: Facebook wants people to see safe and authentic comments, so if a comment violates its Community Standards, it will be removed. However, it also takes into account signals like engagement-bait. This helps address the integrity of information and improve the quality of comments that people see.
What people tell Facebook what they want to see in comments: Facebook has recently been using more surveys to understand what types of comments people want to see. Those will be ranked higher.
How people interact with comments: Do people like, react to, or reply to a comment? Facebook will rank it depending on how people interact with it.
What the poster controls: People can moderate post comments by hiding, deleting, or engaging with them. They can also now decide to enable comment ranking in their settings. However, ranking is on by default for Pages and people with many followers. They can always choose to turn off comment ranking. People who don’t have as many followers will not have comment ranking turned on automatically since there are fewer comments overall.
Now, Facebook will start to show comments on public posts more prominently when the comments have interactions from the Page or person who originally posted, or the comments or reactions are from friends of the person who posted. It will also continue to take other signals into consideration, so low-quality comments are not shown prominently – even if they are from the person who made the original post, or their friends.
[box]Read next: Facebook Now Makes Ranking Updates Based On Results From User Surveys[/box]