Facebook has been ranking comments on posts and now they’re updating how comments are ranked on a public post as well as how comment ranking settings work for Pages and people.
“In addition to ranking posts in people’s News Feed, we rank comments on public posts from Pages and people with a lot of followers, since these posts tend to have many comments. In order to show people relevant and quality comments, we incorporate a number of signals,” Justine Shen, Product Manager at Facebook, writes.
How are public comments ranked on Facebook?
The following parameters, referred to as ‘Signals’ by Shen, are used to rank comments on Facebook’s public post.
- Integrity signals: A comment is removed if it violates Facebook’s Community Standards. Signals like engagement-bait are also taken into account when ranking a comment. This is done to help users see “safe and authentic comments” and “address integrity of information”.
- Surveys: Facebook has been conducting surveys among its users to understand what kind of comments people would want to see and those are usually ranked higher.
- Engagement: The rank of a comment is also dependent on how people are interacting with it, per se, liking, reacting or replying to a comment.
What control do Pages and People have on comment ranks?
Comment ranking is switched on by default for people and pages with a significant following, but these Pages and People can turn off comment ranking if they wish.
Since people or pages that have fewer followers and comments on their posts overall won’t have comment ranking activated by default. But any user can enable comment ranking via settings. As usual, people can hide, delete or engage with a comment.
Any comments that are hidden by Facebook’s spam filter can be displayed by the page/people by hovering over that comment and clicking on Unhide.
How to turn on/off comment ranking for Pages
- Click on Settings
- Click on Comment Ranking (under the General tab)
- To enable comment ranking, click on the check-box besides See most relevant comments by default. To disable, uncheck the box besides See most relevant comments by default
- Click on Save Changes
How to turn on/off comment ranking for People
- Click on the drop-down menu located on the top-right of Facebook
- Click on Settings
- Then select Public Posts
- Find Who Can Follow Me and select Public
- Refresh the page
- Find Comment Ranking and click on Edit
- Select On or Off
How is comment ranking going to change things?
Comments on public posts will be shown more prominently when the Page or Person who originally posted engages with the comments and if the friends of a person are commenting and reacting on a post.
“We will continue to take other signals into account so we do not prominently show low-quality comments, even if they are from the person who made the original post or their friends.”
