With its 2.6 billion users worldwide, including 40 million in France, Facebook has influence and a social responsibility. Its famous recommendation algorithm will promote the dissemination of disgusting content and disintegration. The social network wants to allow its members to control, at least in part.

In the recently announced new tasks, there is the possibility to configure your news feed, which is to say the messages published by your “friends”, so that they are displayed most recently in chronological order. By now, the well-known recommendation algorithm decides to show you what you want based on what it knows about your interests.

This new function is deployed first on Android and will then arrive on the iPhone. Another new function: the possibility to bookmark pages or profiles or vice versa, to hide certain pages. Finally, it will be possible to choose more accurately who can view the content shared on Facebook.

We can compare these new works with a lengthy blog post published on 1 April by Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president in charge of global affairs, titled “You and the algorithm: Tango danced for two”. The author defends the algorithm often criticized by Facebook and holds social media responsible for the polarization of society. Nick Clegg refers users to their responsibilities. “Your news feed is strongly influenced by your choices and actions. “, He writes. In other words, the material we consult or the content we do “Love“ Shape the same material given to us. According to him, the algorithm is just going with the flow.

Nick Clegg, who is also the former UK Deputy Prime Minister, puts it in a more global perspective. “Privatization is at the heart of the growth of the Internet in the last two decades “, He explains. And we are seeing a ““History of speech (…) democratization”. We will not go back, says in substance Nick Clegg, “Democratically elected institutions “ For “Establish new rules “.