As we scroll through our News Feeds, we sometimes pause to view a video shared by our friends, if just out of curiosity. But Facebook is now assuming that if we watch a video, we must like it — and it will respond by providing more videos with similar content.
The social network is continuing to monitor every move in your News Feed, announcing that it will track information about your video-watching habits.
In a blog post on Monday, Facebook's Meihong Wang and Yue Zhuo said the company is taking video actions into account – such as when a user makes the video full screen or turns on the sound – interpreting this to mean that the user likes the video, even though they didn't explicitly "like" it. Facebook will use this data to show its users more content they care about, and less of what they don't.
"So if you turn the volume up or make the video full screen, we have updated News Feed to infer you liked the video and will show you similar videos higher up in your News Feed," the blog post reads. "We have found that this helps us show people more videos that they are interested in."
Facebook just started sharing more videos based on what users are watching, and will continue to do so over the next few weeks. However, Wang and Zhuo say that most pages will not see big changes.
This is not the only tracking news the social network has up its sleeve. The company also announced that it will track how long users look at posts — finding that if people spend more time on one post than others, this means the content was relevant to them. Even if the user didn't like or share or comment on the post, not scrolling past it signifies that the post was something the user found interesting. Related posts will now be found higher up in the News Feed.
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