The way that Facebook controls its News Feed is often controversial and largely opaque to the outside world.

Now the social network is attempting to shine more light on the content it surpresses but doesn't remove entirely. On Thursday, Facebook published its “Content Distribution Guidelines” detailing the roughly three-dozen types of posts it demotes for various reasons in the News Feed, like clickbait and posts by repeat policy offenders. That process, which relies heavily on machine learning technology to automatically detect problematic content, effectively throttles the reach of offending posts and comments without the author knowing.

There’s still plenty that the guidelines, which Facebook has mostly confirmed in various reports...

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