Facebook takes time spent looking at posts into consideration

If a disaster happens and you read about it on Facebook, you might comment or share but you probably aren’t going to like it. For this reason, Facebook is adding a component to their algorithm that takes into account how long a particular post was viewed by individuals. If you read about something and choose not to interact with it because of the subject matter, Facebook is still going to consider it to be something important to you. They came to this conclusion based upon research and user studies.

From this research, we learned that in many cases, just because someone didn’t like, comment or share a story in their News Feed doesn’t mean it wasn’t meaningful to them. There are times when, for example, people want to see information about a serious current event, but don’t necessarily want to like or comment on it. Based on this finding, we are updating News Feed’s ranking to factor in a new signal—how much time you spend viewing a story in your News Feed.