Facebook has recently made some changes to its app (at least in Australia) that set the default settings to not show any posts from news pages. This is probably the direct result of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission trying to force social networks to pay for news. What I noticed in my behaviour is that I stopped using Facebook and had to look for other news sources - this may not be a terrible move but I didn't want to have additional apps for this.

There is a way to get the news back in your news feed though. The app has a settings option at the top of the news feed (you may need to scroll up until it pops into view). This option lets you select the default 'tab' that Facebook shows in the app...


There are three tabs - Home, Favourites and Recent. The Home tab appears to show posts just from your friends and groups you're in - or whatever Facebook's curation decides is relevant to you. Favourites is pretty obvious - what you follow. The Recent tab appears to be what the old news feed was before this change.


Changing this setting to Recent restored posts from various news pages I follow.

What I found quite annoying with this change was that even though I specifically set a number of news pages to 'show first', Facebook still did not show any posts from them in the 'Home' tab. I'm not sure how much more relevant something can be if you explicitly mark it to show first, but that's Facebook for you. At least there is a way to get the old behaviour back.



-i