Part two · The platforms · 03 of 08

Facebook: what Meta demotes, and the organic reach figure it has never published

Publishes more about how it ranks than any other platform here, and less about what it demotes than at any point since 2021. Both of those changed in the same eighteen months.

  • 2bn+

    Daily actives on Facebook, stated January 2026

    Zuckerberg, Q4 2025 call 1

  • ~500

    Posts the Feed shortlist narrows to before heavy ranking

    Meta Feed system card 2

  • 4

    Content types Meta currently publishes as demoted, down from around thirty

    Meta Transparency Center 3

  • 30%+

    Share of recommended Reels posted the same day, Q1 2026

    Meta earnings call 4

  • +9%

    Video watch time in the US and Canada from ranking changes, Q1 2026

    Meta earnings call 4

  • Meta has never published an organic reach figure

    Not once, for Pages, ever. Every "2 percent reach" number in circulation is a tool vendor's own panel. 5

  • The demotion list shrank from about thirty to four

    Most of what agencies still warn about is no longer on Meta's published list at all. 3

  • AI content is labelled, not demoted

    Meta: "We will keep this content on our platforms so we can add informational labels and context." 5

  • Groups do not reach non-members

    No Meta page states that Group content is recommended to people who are not in the group. 5

  1. Meta Platforms, Q4 2025 earnings call transcript, 28 January 2026. Mark Zuckerberg: "more than 2 billion daily actives each on Facebook and WhatsApp." 1st
  2. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. 1st
  3. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . No date shown on the page. Retrieved 28 July 2026. 1st
  4. Meta Platforms, Q1 2026 earnings call transcript, 29 April 2026. 1st
  5. Verified against Meta's Transparency Center and Content Distribution Guidelines, retrieved 28 July 2026. Full detail later in this chapter. 1st

How the Feed ranks.

Meta publishes a system card for Facebook Feed, last updated 4 June 2025. It names four stages. No other platform in this document publishes at this level of detail.

  1. 01

    Gather inventory

    Everything eligible to appear, drawn from accounts, Pages and Groups the person is connected to, plus recommended content from accounts they are not connected to.

  2. 02

    Leverage signals

    A lightweight model narrows that inventory to roughly 500 posts before any heavy ranking runs.

  3. 03

    Make predictions

    Heavier models predict which of those the person will "find most relevant and valuable."

  4. 04

    Rank posts by score

    A relevance score orders the shortlist, then a balancing step varies the mix of post types.

Why the 500 matters

The expensive prediction models never see most of what could have appeared. A post that fails to clear the lightweight first pass is not ranked badly, it is not ranked at all. That is a different failure mode from a low score, and Facebook is the only platform in this document that publishes the existence of the cut.

There is a second, separate system

Facebook Reels has its own system card with its own four stages and its own signal list, last updated 12 March 2025. 7 Feed ranking and Reels ranking are not the same system and Meta documents them separately. See page 47.

  1. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. Stage names are Meta's. 1st
  2. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Reels AI system , updated 12 March 2025. 1st
  3. Mozilla Foundation, This is not a System Card: Scrutinising Meta's Transparency Announcements . No date shown. 2nd

The signals Meta names, in eight groups.

The Feed system card lists dozens of individual inputs. They are grouped as below, with characteristic examples. The examples are descriptions of Meta's listed signals, not quotations.

Signal group What sits in it
Engagement and scrolling Position of the post in Feed. Average time spent on each post. How many times the person quickly scrolled past the same friend's post in the past seven days. Seconds spent on status posts in the past fourteen days. Number of comments on the post.
Stories Stories seen in Feed over 28 days. Videos viewed and videos skipped inside a two hour window. Unique stories watched over seven days. Original stories watched over 28 days.
Video channel How often the person watched video for a given duration in the past seven days. Whether they clicked through into the video channel. Position of the first video story against the first story already seen.
Interest controls Accounts the person marked "interested" in over the past 180 days. Posts where they used the Interested control. Current time. Video length.
Likes and reactions Interactions the post received. Average length of comments on the post. A measure of how relevant those comments are to the post's topic. Topic and category associations.
Groups The person's actions on groups. Time since they joined the group. What share of their total comments come from that specific group.
Link clicks What share of the time they clicked external links against times they saw them, over fourteen days. Total posts seen in Feed over fourteen days. Frequency of mobile interaction.
Social connection Interactions between the person and the post's author. Whether their friends engaged with similar content. Whether the interaction happened in public.
  1. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. Group names are Meta's. Individual signal descriptions are summarised from Meta's published list rather than quoted, because the card is rendered client-side and exact label wording should be re-checked against the live page before being quoted verbatim. 1st

Read the list again and count who it describes.

The signal groups on the previous page are worth a second pass, because of what they are mostly made of.

The negative space

Nothing in the published list describes posting time of day, posting frequency, hashtags, caption length, or whether a post contains an external link. Clickbait Links is a demotion category, which is a separate mechanism from a ranking signal. 10 , 11

One input worth singling out

Meta lists the average length of comments on a post, and a measure of how relevant those comments are to the post's topic. Comment quality, not comment count. It is the only place in any platform's published documentation where the substance of a comment is named as a ranking input. 10

And one that is easy to miss

Number of times the person quickly scrolled past the same friend's post in the past seven days. Meta is explicitly measuring the speed of a skip, not just its absence. Scrolling past fast is a signal in its own right. 10

  1. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. 1st
  2. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . No date shown. Absence of the named items verified against the live page, 28 July 2026. 1st

Reels is a separate system.

Its own card, its own four stages, its own signals, and a published list of the outcomes it tries to predict. That prediction list is the most revealing thing Meta publishes about any of its feeds.

What the system tries to predict

Whether the person clicks to view full screen
Whether they watch more than 10 seconds
Whether they complete the reel
Whether they share it to WhatsApp
Whether they like it
Whether they follow the creator
How long they spend engaging with the reels that come after it
Whether they watch more than 5 minutes in full screen

Signals named on the Reels card

Length of the reel. Similarity to other reels. Reels the person watched completely. Reels they watched in loop. How many times they moved straight on to the next reel after watching that author. How many times the reel was viewed by others for less than three seconds. How many times they have shared content to WhatsApp overall. 12

  1. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Reels AI system , updated 12 March 2025. Predictions and signals as listed by Meta, summarised rather than quoted for the reason given on page 45. 1st

What Facebook says it demotes. All four of them.

Meta's live Content Distribution Guidelines page lists four content types. Around thirty are still quoted across the industry as current Facebook policy. This is the page as published, in full.

Responding to people's direct feedback

Clickbait Links

Engagement Bait

Meta's stated reason: "people dislike spammy posts on Facebook that ask them to interact by liking, sharing, commenting, and taking other actions." 14

Incentivising high-quality content

Fact-Checked Misinformation

Still listed on the page as of 28 July 2026, which sits directly against Meta's January 2025 announcement. See page 48.

Fostering a safer community

Content Likely Violating Our Community Standards

Meta separately describes reducing "borderline" content, giving profanity, borderline hate speech and gory images as its own examples. 13

Engagement bait, defined

"Posts that explicitly request engagement (such as votes, shares, comments, tags, likes, or other reactions)." Exempt: finding missing people, fundraising, petitions, showing support for issues, and time-sensitive information about disasters and life-threatening events. 14

Note this is a Facebook rule. As covered on page 30, the same wording does not appear anywhere in Instagram's Recommendation Guidelines, though it is routinely attributed to both.

  1. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . Carries no publication or last-updated date. Retrieved 28 July 2026. 1st
  2. Meta Transparency Center, Engagement Bait , content distribution guidelines. Changelog displays "Today" rather than a fixed date, so the page cannot be dated by a reader. 1st

Why the list got shorter.

On 7 January 2025 Meta published a policy reversal. Read against the Guidelines page, it explains the shrinkage and creates a contradiction Meta has not resolved.

What Meta announced

"We demote too much content that our systems predict might violate our standards. We are in the process of getting rid of most of these demotions and requiring greater confidence that the content violates for the rest."

Joel Kaplan, Chief Global Affairs Officer, 7 January 2025 15

The same post states Meta will "stop demoting fact checked content," will treat civic content from followed accounts "more like any other content in your feed," and will "recommend more political content" based on personalised signals. 15

A second stale page

Meta's enforcement page on repeatedly posting low-quality content still covers both engagement bait and unoriginal content, and was last updated 19 January 2022. It states: "When publishers repeatedly post unoriginal or repurposed content from other sources, without adding new value, we demote it." 17

  1. Meta Newsroom, More Speech and Fewer Mistakes , Joel Kaplan, 7 January 2025. 1st
  2. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . No date shown. Retrieved 28 July 2026. 1st
  3. Meta Transparency Center, Repeatedly posting low-quality content , last updated 19 January 2022. 1st

Unoriginal content, twice.

Meta announced enforcement in July 2025 and published a definition in March 2026. Neither contains a numeric threshold, which is the opposite of Instagram, where the threshold is the whole rule.

July 2025, the enforcement

"If our systems detect duplicate videos on Facebook, we will reduce the distribution of the copies so that original creators can get the visibility that they deserve." 18

"Pages and profiles receive the greatest distribution when they consist primarily of original content that you filmed or created." 18

Accounts repeatedly reusing others' content lose access to monetisation for a period and receive "reduced distribution on everything they share." 18

March 2026, the definition

Original means content "filmed or produced directly by a creator or owner of a Profile or Page." Using someone else's material still counts as original where the creator adds "something genuinely new, like fresh information, analysis, or substantial improvements." 19

Unoriginal includes "simply watching along, reacting with facial expressions, stitching multiple clips together, or narrating what's already on screen, without adding anything meaningful," and content involving "adding borders, inserting captions, and changing the reel's speed." 19

  • 500,000

    Accounts actioned for spammy behaviour or fake engagement, first half of 2025 18

  • 20m+

    Accounts impersonating large creators removed across 2025 19

  • 2x

    Approximate rise in views and watch time on original Reels, second half of 2025 against 2024 19

  1. Facebook Creators blog, Combating Unoriginal Content , 14 July 2025. 1st
  2. Meta Newsroom, Rewarding Original Creators on Facebook , Joe Damiani, 13 March 2026. 1st

Organic reach, and a number Meta has never published.

Every Facebook Page organic reach percentage in circulation comes from a third party. Meta has published none of them.

The one thing Meta has confirmed, and how narrow it is

"Pages that post promotional creative should expect their organic distribution to fall significantly over time."

Meta Newsroom, 14 November 2014 20

Twelve years old, and conditional on promotional content. It is not a general admission that Page reach declined, and it is regularly presented as one.

What Meta has published instead: unconnected content

Date Share of Feed recommended by AI from accounts the person does not follow
Jul 2022 "About 15%" on Facebook. Zuckerberg added: "We expect these numbers to more than double by the end of next year." 21
Jun 2023 "More than 20 percent" across Facebook and Instagram. 22
Since Nothing. No Meta-published figure for Facebook after June 2023.

Meta's own 2023 figure did not reach the level its own 2022 prediction implied, and it has not published a reconciling number. Anyone quoting a current unconnected-content percentage is using the 2023 figure or an unsourced one.

  1. Meta Newsroom, Reducing Overly Promotional Page Posts in News Feed , 14 November 2014. 1st
  2. Meta Platforms, Q2 2022 earnings call transcript, 27 July 2022, Mark Zuckerberg. 1st
  3. Meta AI blog, The AI behind unconnected content recommendations on Facebook and Instagram , 29 June 2023. 1st

Groups.

Meta publishes a separate system card for the Groups feed, names Groups signals inside Feed ranking, and has been building Groups out through 2025 and 2026. What it does not publish is the thing most people assume.

The Groups signals inside Feed ranking

The person's actions on groups. Time since they joined the group. What share of their total comments come from that specific group. All three describe the member, not the post. 23

November 2025, private to public conversion

Admins of private Groups can now convert them to public. Meta's wording on what happens to the archive: "All content, including posts, comments, and reactions, shared while the group was private will only be visible to those who were members of the group before it became public." 24

New posts after conversion are "visible to anyone, including people who aren't on Facebook." Admins get a three day window to cancel. 24

July 2026, a separate Groups app

Meta announced Forum, a dedicated Facebook Groups app in testing since May 2026, with a Group Ask feature and an Admin AI. Announced alongside a Creator Studio app, a Marketplace seller app, and Facebook Verified. 25

  1. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. 1st
  2. Meta Newsroom, New Facebook Update Gives Group Admins More Flexibility While Protecting Member Privacy , 3 November 2025. 1st
  3. Meta Newsroom, Connecting Real People on Facebook , Tom Alison, 24 July 2026. 1st

Eighteen months of changes, dated.

Everything Meta has announced about Facebook ranking, distribution or eligibility since the start of 2025, with what each one actually does.

Date Announcement What it changes
7 Jan 2025 More Speech and Fewer Mistakes Stop demoting fact-checked content. Remove most predictive demotions. Civic content from followed accounts ranked like any other. Recommend more political content. 26
12 Mar 2025 Reels system card updated Current published description of Reels ranking. 27
4 Jun 2025 Feed system card updated Current published description of Feed ranking. 28
14 Jul 2025 Combating Unoriginal Content Duplicate videos demoted. Reduced distribution on everything a repeat offender shares. Monetisation withdrawn. 29
3 Nov 2025 Group privacy conversion Private Groups can go public. Historical content stays member-only. 30
13 Mar 2026 Rewarding Original Creators Original content defined. Unoriginal content deprioritised, made non-recommendable, demonetised. 31
24 Jul 2026 Connecting Real People on Facebook Forum app for Groups, Creator Studio app, Marketplace seller app, Facebook Verified. Full-screen video-first Facebook in international testing later in 2026, US rollout in 2027. 32

What Meta told investors the ranking work produced

Q4 2025: a 7 percent lift in views of organic Feed and video posts on Facebook, and 25 percent more same-day Reels surfaced than the prior quarter. 33 Q1 2026: a 9 percent increase in video watch time in the US and Canada, total video time up more than 8 percent globally, and same-day posts now more than 30 percent of recommended Reels on both Facebook and Instagram. 34

  1. Meta Newsroom, 7 January 2025.
  2. Reels system card, 12 March 2025.
  3. Feed system card, 4 June 2025. 1st
  4. Facebook Creators blog, 14 July 2025.
  5. Meta Newsroom, 3 November 2025.
  6. Meta Newsroom, 13 March 2026. 1st
  7. Meta Newsroom, 24 July 2026.
  8. Meta Q4 2025 earnings call, 28 January 2026.
  9. Meta Q1 2026 earnings call, 29 April 2026. 1st

Five claims checked against the source.

One of these is true, which makes it the only platform in this chapter where a widely repeated claim survives contact with the documentation.

The claim Verdict What the source actually says
Facebook demotes engagement bait True It is one of only four content types on Meta's live Content Distribution Guidelines page. Defined as "posts that explicitly request engagement (such as votes, shares, comments, tags, likes, or other reactions)," with exemptions for missing persons, fundraising, petitions and emergencies. 35 This is a Facebook rule and not an Instagram one, despite being attributed to both.
Facebook organic reach is around 2 percent Not from Meta Meta has never published an organic reach figure for Pages. Every circulating percentage comes from a social media tool vendor's own panel. The only Meta statement on the subject is from 2014 and is conditional on promotional content. 36
Facebook demotes AI-generated content No source Meta labels AI content rather than reducing it: "We will keep this content on our platforms so we can add informational labels and context." 37 Demotion attaches to fact-checked false content, not to the fact that something was AI-generated. The March 2026 originality rules will catch low-effort AI output in practice, but Meta does not frame it as an AI policy.
Facebook penalises link posts and low-quality sites No longer published Links to low-quality sites, ad farms and low-quality browsing experiences were categories in earlier versions of the Guidelines. None appears on the current page. Clickbait Links does remain. 38
Posting in a Group reaches people outside it Unsupported No Meta page states that Group content is recommended to non-members. Meta's November 2025 announcement addresses who can see a public Group's posts, which is visibility, not distribution. The Groups signals in Feed ranking all describe the member, not the reach. 39
  1. Meta Transparency Center, Engagement Bait and Types of Content We Demote . Neither carries a readable date. 1st
  2. Meta Newsroom, Reducing Overly Promotional Page Posts in News Feed , 14 November 2014. Absence of any later figure verified across Meta properties. 1st
  3. Meta Newsroom, Our Approach to Labeling AI-Generated Content and Manipulated Media , published 5 April 2024, updated 12 September 2024. 1st
  4. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . Retrieved 28 July 2026. 1st
  5. Meta Newsroom, 3 November 2025, and the Facebook Feed system card, 4 June 2025. 1st

Questions people ask about this chapter

Every answer below is the chapter's own wording, with a link to the page it sits on.

Why did my Facebook reach drop to nothing?

A post that fails to clear the lightweight first pass is not ranked badly, it is not ranked at all.

Read the full answer
Do posting time, frequency or hashtags affect Facebook reach?

Nothing in the published list describes posting time of day, posting frequency, hashtags, caption length, or whether a post contains an external link.

Read the full answer
Is Facebook Reels ranked the same way as the feed?

Feed ranking and Reels ranking are not the same system and Meta documents them separately.

Read the full answer
What is the average organic reach for a Facebook Page?

Every Facebook Page organic reach percentage in circulation comes from a third party.

Read the full answer
Does posting in a Group reach people who are not members?

Any claim that posting in a Group reaches non-members through the algorithm is unsupported by anything Meta publishes.

Read the full answer

Sources

  1. Meta Platforms, Q4 2025 earnings call transcript, 28 January 2026. Mark Zuckerberg: "more than 2 billion daily actives each on Facebook and WhatsApp." 1st
  2. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. 1st
  3. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . No date shown on the page. Retrieved 28 July 2026. 1st
  4. Meta Platforms, Q1 2026 earnings call transcript, 29 April 2026. 1st
  5. Verified against Meta's Transparency Center and Content Distribution Guidelines, retrieved 28 July 2026. Full detail later in this chapter. 1st
  6. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. Stage names are Meta's. 1st
  7. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Reels AI system , updated 12 March 2025. 1st
  8. Mozilla Foundation, This is not a System Card: Scrutinising Meta's Transparency Announcements . No date shown. 2nd
  9. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. Group names are Meta's. Individual signal descriptions are summarised from Meta's published list rather than quoted, because the card is rendered client-side and exact label wording should be re-checked against the live page before being quoted verbatim. 1st
  10. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. 1st
  11. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . No date shown. Absence of the named items verified against the live page, 28 July 2026. 1st
  12. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Reels AI system , updated 12 March 2025. Predictions and signals as listed by Meta, summarised rather than quoted for the reason given on page 45. 1st
  13. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . Carries no publication or last-updated date. Retrieved 28 July 2026. 1st
  14. Meta Transparency Center, Engagement Bait , content distribution guidelines. Changelog displays "Today" rather than a fixed date, so the page cannot be dated by a reader. 1st
  15. Meta Newsroom, More Speech and Fewer Mistakes , Joel Kaplan, 7 January 2025. 1st
  16. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . No date shown. Retrieved 28 July 2026. 1st
  17. Meta Transparency Center, Repeatedly posting low-quality content , last updated 19 January 2022. 1st
  18. Facebook Creators blog, Combating Unoriginal Content , 14 July 2025. 1st
  19. Meta Newsroom, Rewarding Original Creators on Facebook , Joe Damiani, 13 March 2026. 1st
  20. Meta Newsroom, Reducing Overly Promotional Page Posts in News Feed , 14 November 2014. 1st
  21. Meta Platforms, Q2 2022 earnings call transcript, 27 July 2022, Mark Zuckerberg. 1st
  22. Meta AI blog, The AI behind unconnected content recommendations on Facebook and Instagram , 29 June 2023. 1st
  23. Meta Transparency Center, Facebook Feed AI system , updated 4 June 2025. 1st
  24. Meta Newsroom, New Facebook Update Gives Group Admins More Flexibility While Protecting Member Privacy , 3 November 2025. 1st
  25. Meta Newsroom, Connecting Real People on Facebook , Tom Alison, 24 July 2026. 1st
  26. Meta Newsroom, 7 January 2025.
  27. Reels system card, 12 March 2025.
  28. Feed system card, 4 June 2025. 1st
  29. Facebook Creators blog, 14 July 2025.
  30. Meta Newsroom, 3 November 2025.
  31. Meta Newsroom, 13 March 2026. 1st
  32. Meta Newsroom, 24 July 2026.
  33. Meta Q4 2025 earnings call, 28 January 2026.
  34. Meta Q1 2026 earnings call, 29 April 2026. 1st
  35. Meta Transparency Center, Engagement Bait and Types of Content We Demote . Neither carries a readable date. 1st
  36. Meta Newsroom, Reducing Overly Promotional Page Posts in News Feed , 14 November 2014. Absence of any later figure verified across Meta properties. 1st
  37. Meta Newsroom, Our Approach to Labeling AI-Generated Content and Manipulated Media , published 5 April 2024, updated 12 September 2024. 1st
  38. Meta Transparency Center, Types of Content We Demote . Retrieved 28 July 2026. 1st
  39. Meta Newsroom, 3 November 2025, and the Facebook Feed system card, 4 June 2025. 1st