Redesigned Trending Results Page

Starting today, we’re introducing a redesigned Trending results page, which is the page you see when you click on a Trending topic to learn more about it.

You’ve always been able to click on a topic to see related posts and stories, but we’ve redesigned the page to make it easier to discover other publications that are covering the story, as well as what your friends and public figures are saying about it.

You’ll be able to see the new results page on iPhone in the US, and we plan to make it available on Android and desktop soon.

Now, when you click on a Trending topic, you’ll see a carousel with stories from other publications about a given topic that you can swipe through. By making it easier to see what other news outlets are saying about each topic, we hope that people will feel more informed about the news in their region.

The stories that appear in this section are some of the most popular stories about that topic on Facebook. These stories are determined the same way as the featured headline — using a combination of factors including the engagement around the article on Facebook, the engagement around the publisher overall, and whether other articles are linking to it.

There is no predetermined list of publications that are eligible to appear in Trending and this update does not affect how Trending topics are identified, which we announced earlier this year.

Making Trending Easier to Discover On Mobile

One of the things we regularly hear from people who use Trending is that it can be difficult to find in the Facebook mobile app. We’re soon beginning a test in News Feed that will show people the top three Trending stories, which they can click on to see the full list of Trending topics and explore what people are discussing on Facebook.

While most people will not see Trending in their News Feed as part of this small test, we hope that it will help us learn how to make Trending as useful and informative for people as possible. If you do see the Trending unit in your News Feed, you have the option to remove it in the drop-down menu which will prevent it from being shown to you in the future.

As before, we continue to listen to feedback about Trending and will keep making improvements in order to provide a valuable experience.

Facebook is a place where people come together to connect with their communities and support one another in meaningful ways. Today, we are giving people another way to mobilize around causes they care about by expanding personal fundraisers to everyone over 18 in the US and by adding two new categories – community and sports.

We began testing personal fundraisers, a new product that allows people to raise money for a friend, themselves or a sick pet directly on Facebook, in March. Since then, we’ve been inspired by the response to create them and the support felt by those they benefit.

People can create a fundraiser to quickly raise money on Facebook and easily reach their friends in a few taps, without leaving Facebook, and can share fundraisers to help build momentum. People can learn about the person who created the fundraiser and the person benefiting from the fundraiser, as well as see which friends have donated. Now people can raise money for any of the following categories:

• • Education: such as tuition, books or classroom supplies
  • Medical: such as medical procedures, treatments or injuries
  • Pet Medical: such as veterinary procedures, treatments or injuries
  • Crisis Relief: such as public crises or natural disasters
  • Personal Emergency: such as a house fire, theft or car accident
  • Funeral and Loss: such as burial expenses or living costs after losing a loved one
  • Sports: such as equipment, competitions or team fees
  • Community: such as neighborhood services, community improvements or environmental improvements

Nonprofit fundraisers continue to be available for people on Facebook to raise funds and awareness for 501(c)(3) nonprofits.

It’s easy to get started:

1. On mobile, tap the menu icon and select Fundraisers, or on desktop, go to facebook.com/fundraisers
2. Choose to raise money for a Friend, Yourself or Someone or Something Not on Facebook
3. Give your fundraiser a title and compelling story, and start raising money

All fundraisers are reviewed within 24 hours. Personal fundraisers are available on all devices, and have a 6.9% + $0.30 fee that goes to payment processing, fundraiser vetting, and security and fraud protection. Facebook’s goal is to create a platform for good that’s sustainable over the long-term, and not to make a profit from our charitable giving tools.

We’re constantly inspired by the good people on Facebook do, and we’re excited to learn more about how people use this new product so we can continue improving the experience.

Find out more about Facebook fundraisers at facebook.com/fundraisers.

We know Facebook Live is better with friends. We’ve been working on ways to make Live more fun, social and interactive, like with the new Live interactive effects we announced last month. Today we’re excited to announce two new features that make it easier to share experiences and connect in real time with your friends on Live.

Live Chat With Friends

One of the best things about Live is that you can discuss what’s happening in the broadcast in real time. In fact, people comment more than 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos. When it comes to compelling public broadcasts — such as a breaking news event, a Q&A with your favorite actor or behind-the-scenes action after a big game — watching with the community and reading comments is an exciting part of the experience. We know sometimes people also want the option to interact with only their friends during a public live broadcast, so we’re rolling out Live Chat With Friends.

Live Chat With Friends lets you invite friends to a private chat about a public live broadcast. You can invite friends who are already watching or other friends who you think may want to tune in. You’re able to jump back into the public conversation at any time, and you can still continue chatting with your friends via Messenger after the broadcast ends.

With Live Chat With Friends, you can be part of big moments with the wider community but also have the option to participate in personal conversations with the people closest to you, directly within the Live experience. We’re testing this feature on mobile in several countries, and we look forward to making it available more broadly later this summer.

Live With
Last year we started rolling out the ability for public figures to go live with a guest. Now available for all profiles and Pages on iOS, Live With lets you invite a friend into your live video so you can hang out together, even if you’re not in the same place. Sharing the screen with a friend can make going live more fun and interactive — for both you and your viewers.

To invite a friend to join you in your live video, simply select a guest from the Live Viewers section, or tap a comment from the viewer you want to invite. Your viewer can then choose whether or not to join your broadcast. You can go live with a guest in both portrait mode (for a picture-in-picture experience) and landscape mode (for a side-by-side experience). For a full tutorial, click here.

We’re excited to see how people use these Facebook Live features to come together around moments big and small.

Last month, people shared several horrific videos on Facebook of Syrian children in the aftermath of a chemical weapons attack. The videos, which also appeared elsewhere on the internet, showed the children shaking, struggling to breathe and eventually dying.

The images were deeply shocking – so much so that we placed a warning screen in front of them. But the images also prompted international outrage and renewed attention on the plight of Syrians.

Reviewing online material on a global scale is challenging and essential. As the person in charge of doing this work for Facebook, I want to explain how and where we draw the line.

On an average day, more than a billion people use Facebook. They share posts in dozens of languages: everything from photos to live videos. A very small percentage of those will be reported to us for investigation. The range of issues is broad – from bullying and hate speech to terrorism – and complex. Designing policies that both keep people safe and enable them to share freely means understanding emerging social issues and the way they manifest themselves online, and being able to respond quickly to millions of reports a week from people all over the world.

For our reviewers, there is another hurdle: understanding context. It’s hard to judge the intent behind one post, or the risk implied in another. Someone posts a graphic video of a terrorist attack. Will it inspire people to emulate the violence, or speak out against it? Someone posts a joke about suicide. Are they just being themselves, or is it a cry for help?

In the UK, being critical of the monarchy might be acceptable. In some parts of the world it will get you a jail sentence. Laws can provide guidance, but often what’s acceptable is more about norms and expectations. New ways to tell stories and share images can bring these tensions to the surface faster than ever.

We aim to keep our site safe. We don’t always share the details of our policies, because we don’t want to encourage people to find workarounds – but we do publish our Community Standards, which set out what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook, and why.

Our standards change over time. We are in constant dialogue with experts and local organizations, on everything from child safety to terrorism to human rights.  Sometimes this means our policies can seem counterintuitive. As the Guardian reported, experts in self-harm advised us that it can be better to leave live videos of self-harm running so that people can be alerted to help, but to take them down afterwards to prevent copycats. When a girl in Georgia, USA, attempted suicide on Facebook Live two weeks ago, her friends were able to notify police, who managed to reach her in time.

We try hard to stay objective. The cases we review aren’t the easy ones: they are often in a grey area where people disagree. Art and pornography aren’t always easily distinguished, but we’ve found that digitally generated images of nudity are more likely to be pornographic than handmade ones, so our policy reflects that.

There’s a big difference between general expressions of anger and specific calls for a named individual to be harmed, so we allow the former but don’t permit the latter.

These tensions – between raising awareness of violence and promoting it, between freedom of expression and freedom from fear, between bearing witness to something and gawking at it – are complicated, and there are rarely universal legal standards to provide clarity. Being as objective as possible is the only way we can be consistent across the world. But we still sometimes end up making the wrong call.

The hypothetical situations we use to train reviewers are intentionally extreme. They’re designed to help the people who do this work deal with the most difficult cases. When we first created our content standards nearly a decade ago, much was left to the discretion of individual employees. But because no two people will have identical views of what defines hate speech or bullying – or any number of other issues – we now include clear definitions.

We face criticism from people who want more censorship and people who want less. We see that as a useful signal that we are not leaning too far in any one direction.

I hope that readers will understand that we take our role extremely seriously. For many of us on the team within Facebook, safety is a passion that predates our work at the company: I spent more than a decade as a criminal prosecutor, investigating everything from child sexual exploitation to terrorism. Our team also includes a counter extremism expert from the UK, the former research director of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, a rape crisis center worker, and a teacher.

All of us know there is more we can do. Last month, we announced that we are hiring an extra 3,000 reviewers. This is demanding work, and we will continue to do more to ensure we are giving them the right support, both by making it easier to escalate hard decisions quickly and by providing the psychological support they need.

Technology has given more people more power to communicate more widely than ever before. We believe the benefits of sharing far outweigh the risks. But we also recognize that society is still figuring out what is acceptable and what is harmful, and that we, at Facebook, can play an important part of that conversation.

People tell us they don’t like stories that are misleading, sensational or spammy. That includes clickbait headlines that are designed to get attention and lure visitors into clicking on a link. In an effort to support an informed community, we’re always working to determine what stories might have clickbait headlines so we can show them less often.

Last year we made an update to News Feed to reduce stories from sources that consistently post clickbait headlines that withhold and exaggerate information. Today, we are making three updates that build on this work so that people will see even fewer clickbait stories in their feeds, and more of the stories they find authentic.

• First, we are now taking into account clickbait at the individual post level in addition to the domain and Page level, in order to more precisely reduce clickbait headlines.
• Second, in order to make this more effective, we are dividing our efforts into two separate signals — so we will now look at whether a headline withholds information or if it exaggerates information separately.
• Third, we are starting to test this work in additional languages.

How We Are Improving Our Efforts

One of our News Feed values is authentic communication, so we’ve been working to understand what people find authentic and what people do not.

We’ve learned from last year’s update that we can better detect different kinds of clickbait headlines by separately — rather than jointly — identifying signals that withhold or exaggerate information.

Headlines that withhold information intentionally leave out crucial details or mislead people, forcing them to click to find out the answer. For example, “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS…” Headlines that exaggerate the details of a story with sensational language tend to make the story seem like a bigger deal than it really is. For example, “WOW! Ginger tea is the secret to everlasting youth. You’ve GOT to see this!”

We addressed this similarly to how we previously worked to reduce clickbait: We categorized hundreds of thousands of headlines as clickbait or not clickbait by considering if the headline exaggerates the details of a story, and separately if the headline withholds information. A team at Facebook reviewed thousands of headlines using these criteria, validating each other’s work to identify large sets of clickbait headlines.

From there, we identify what phrases are commonly used in clickbait headlines that are not used in other headlines. This is similar to how many email spam filters work.

Posts with clickbait headlines will appear lower in News Feed. We will continue to learn over time, and we hope to continue expanding this work to reduce clickbait in even more languages.

Will This Impact My Page?

We anticipate that most Pages won’t see any significant changes to their distribution in News Feed as a result of this update.

Publishers that rely on clickbait headlines should expect their distribution to decrease. Pages should avoid headlines that withhold information required to understand the content of the article and headlines that exaggerate the article to create misleading expectations. If a Page stops posting clickbait and sensational headlines, their posts will stop being impacted by this change.

As always, Pages should refer to our publishing best practices. We will learn from these changes and will continue to work on reducing clickbait so News Feed is a place for authentic communication.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the US, and this month Facebook is letting people know about our tools and resources we have developed for people who may be struggling. People may see videos or photos in News Feed for a broad awareness campaign about supportive groups, crisis support over Messenger and suicide prevention tools.

We’ve been committed to mental health support for many years, and this is one of the ways we’re working to build a safer and more supportive community on Facebook. As we continue to invest in new tools and resources, we hope Facebook can help provide support to more people over time. For example, Mama Dragons, a Utah community of mothers with LGBTQ children, uses Facebook Groups to share experiences and offer support.

Finding Supportive Groups

On Facebook, people can connect to groups that support them through difficult times. Throughout May, we’ll be helping more people find groups about mental health and well-being.

Crisis Support Over Messenger

People can talk in real time with trained crisis and mental health support volunteers over Messenger. Participating organizations include Crisis Text Line, the National Eating Disorder Association, Partnership for Drug-Free Kids and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. We are also happy to announce that we will be adding The Trevor Project, an organization focused on crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth. The option will roll out over the next few months.

Suicide Prevention Tools and Resources

We’ve offered suicide prevention tools on Facebook for more than 10 years. We developed these in collaboration with mental health organizations such as Save.org, National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Forefront and Crisis Text Line, and with people who have personal experience thinking about or attempting suicide. Last year we expanded the availability of these tools worldwide with the help of over 70 partners, and we’ve improved them based on new technology and feedback from the community.

This month Instagram is also helping to raise awareness about mental health and the communities of support that exist on the platform. To learn more about the tools and resources available on Instagram and the #HereForYou initiative, visit instagram-together.com.

Together, we hope these resources help more people who may be struggling and and we’re continuously improving them to build a safer and more supportive community on Facebook.

The bug affected billing only for the following conditions: for the video carousel ad unit; when the advertiser chose to bid on link clicks; and only for people who were on smartphone web browsers. In these cases, instead of being billed only for link clicks (clicks to an advertiser’s selected destination), these advertisers were incorrectly billed when people clicked on the videos in the carousel to enlarge and watch them. Advertisers will receive a full credit for the charges they incurred for these misattributed clicks.

Most consumers use Facebook through the app on their phones, and mobile web browser ad impressions make up a small percentage of the overall ads impressions people see on Facebook. Given that this bug related to mobile web for smartphones only, and specifically for video carousel ads that bid on link clicks, the impact from a billing perspective was 0.04% of ads impressions. Regardless of how many impressions were affected, we take all bugs seriously and apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

In 2016, Mother’s Day drove more posts in one day than any other topic on Facebook, with more than 105 million Mother’s Day posts. In fact, to show thanks and gratitude, people came to Facebook to post photos and videos, which spiked significantly on Mother’s Day with over 850 million photos and videos shared.*

This year, Facebook is providing new ways for you to show mom or a loved one that you appreciate everything they do.

Send a Personalized Card

Today you might see a message from Facebook in your News Feed wishing you a happy Mother’s Day and inviting you to share a card with a mom or loved one.On mobile, you can personalize some of the cards by adding a photo, giving you the opportunity to share what Mother’s Day means to you.

Jazz Up Your Photos

In Facebook Camera, you can find some new colorful Mother’s Day-themed masks and frames. If you swipe right on News Feed, go to the effects tray and you’ll be able to find the effects in the mask and frame category.

Support a Cause In Honor Of Mom

In the US, start a Facebook fundraiser or donate to your favorite cause in honor of your mom. On Facebook, you can raise money for a nonprofit or people — for yourself, a friend or someone or something not on Facebook.

Show Your Thanks

You may see a new “thankful” addition to reactions during the days surrounding Mother’s Day. When a person chooses this temporary flower reaction, they’ll see something special that wraps around the post they’re reacting to.

Add a Sticker to Your Instagram Story

Finally, if you’re using Instagram, you may also see a set of new stickers to help you celebrate the mothers in your life. Simply open the camera and take a photo or video, then add as many stickers as you want.

We hope everyone will join in celebrating everything that mothers do for us on this special day. Even by simply wishing someone “Happy Mother’s Day” in the comments (Psst…try it and see what happens!) you will be contributing to a worldwide outpouring of appreciation for moms everywhere.

*Data from May 8, 2016

We want to help people build an informed community on Facebook. That’s why we’re always working to understand which posts people consider misleading, sensational and spammy so we can show fewer of those and show more informative posts instead.

We hear from our community that they’re disappointed when they click on a link that leads to a web page containing little substantive content and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads. People expect their experience after clicking on a post to be straightforward.

Starting today, we’re rolling out an update so people see fewer posts and ads in News Feed that link to these low-quality web page experiences. Similar to the work we’re already doing to stop misinformation, this update will help reduce the economic incentives of financially-motivated spammers.

A More Informative Experience

We have had a policy in place since last year to prevent advertisers with low-quality web page experiences from advertising on our platform. Now, we are increasing enforcement on ads and also taking into account organic posts in News Feed.

With this update, we reviewed hundreds of thousands of web pages linked to from Facebook to identify those that contain little substantive content and have a large number of disruptive, shocking or malicious ads. We then used artificial intelligence to understand whether new web pages shared on Facebook have similar characteristics. So if we determine a post might link to these types of low-quality web pages, it may show up lower in people’s feeds and may not be eligible to be an ad. This way people can see fewer misleading posts and more informative posts.

Will This Impact My Page or Ad Account?

These changes will roll out gradually over the coming months. Publishers that do not have the type of low-quality landing page experience referenced may see a small increase in traffic, while publishers who do should see a decline in traffic. This update is one of many signals we use to rank News Feed, so impact will vary by publisher, and Pages should continue posting stories their audiences will like.

For advertisers and publishers looking for tips on how to improve their web experiences, please read the full Facebook Business post and visit our Help Center.