By Justine Shen, Product Manager

We’re always working to ensure that people’s time on Facebook is well spent. One way we do this is through ranking, which promotes meaningful conversations by showing people the posts and comments most relevant to them. Today we’re making an update to improve comment ranking on public posts, and we want to explain how this works and how Pages and people can control their own comment ranking settings.

How We Rank Public Comments

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, including:

• Integrity signals: We want people to see safe and authentic comments. If a comment violates our Community Standards, we remove it. We also take into account other signals, like engagement-bait, to address the integrity of information and improve the quality of comments people see.
• What people tell us they want to see in comments: We’ve been using more surveys to help us understand the types of comments people want to see, so we can rank those higher.
• How people interact with comments: This includes signals including whether people like, react to, or reply to a comment.
• What the poster controls: People can moderate the comments on their post by hiding, deleting, or engaging with comments. Ranking is on by default for Pages and people with a a lot of followers, but Pages and people with a lot of followers can choose to turn off comment ranking. People who don’t have as many followers will not have comment ranking turned on automatically since there are less comments overall, but any person can decide to enable comment ranking by going to their settings. (See more details here.)

Always Improving Comment Ranking

To improve relevance and quality, we’ll start showing comments on public posts more prominently when:

• The comments have interactions from the Page or person who originally posted; or
• The comments or reactions are from friends of the person who posted.

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.