About recommendations on Facebook

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We make personalised recommendations to the people who use our services to help them discover new communities and content. Both Facebook and Instagram may recommend content, accounts and entities (such as Pages, Groups or Events) that people do not already follow. Some examples of our recommendation experiences include Pages you may like, "Suggested for you" posts in Feed, People you may know or Groups you should join.
Our goal is to make recommendations that are relevant and valuable to each person who sees them. We work towards our goal by personalising recommendations, which means making unique recommendations for each person. For example, if you and another person have Facebook friends in common, we may suggest that person as a potential new friend for you.

Facebook's baseline standards for recommendations

At Facebook, we have guidelines that govern what content we will recommend to people. Through our Recommendations Guidelines, we work to avoid making recommendations that could be low-quality, objectionable or particularly sensitive. For users under 18, Facebook has additional age-appropriate content guidelines. Our Recommendations Guidelines are designed to maintain a higher standard than our Community Standards, because recommended content and connections are from accounts or entities that you haven't chosen to follow. Therefore, not all content allowed on our platform will be eligible for recommendation. We use technology to detect content, accounts and entities that don't meet these Recommendations Guidelines and to help us avoid recommending them. As always, more severe violations of our Community Standards will be removed from Facebook.
In developing these guidelines, we sought input from 50 leading experts specialising in recommender systems, expression, safety and digital rights. Those consultations are part of our constant efforts to improve these guidelines and provide people with a safe and positive experience when they receive recommendations on our platform. We've worked with youth experts around the world to understand what types of content may be appropriate for adults, but too mature for teens. Our guidelines are designed to ensure that recommendations are appropriate for our global community while providing enhanced protections for teen users.
We want to provide you with more information about the types of content, accounts and entities that we try to avoid recommending, both to keep our community more informed and to provide guidance for content creators about recommendations.

Content recommendations

There are three categories of content that are allowed on our platforms, but that may not be eligible for recommendations. These categories are listed below, as are some illustrative examples of content within each category.
Content that impedes our ability to foster a safe community, such as:
  1. Content that discusses self-harm, suicide or eating disorders, as well as content that depicts or trivialises themes around death or depression. (We remove content that encourages suicide or self-injury, or any graphic imagery.) We hide certain suicide and self-injury related content to protect teens from potentially distressing or sensitive material. For example, we would age restrict:
    • A post where someone is describing their own personal experiences with suicide, self-injury or eating disorders, except in the context of recovery.
    • A photo or video showing people in a hospital engaging in euthanasia or assisted suicide.
    • A story where someone is talking about their own extreme weight loss behaviour.
  2. Content that may depict violence, such as people fighting. (We remove graphically violent content.) We hide most graphic and disturbing imagery from teens, even if we'd allow it behind a warning screen for adults. For example, we would age restrict:
    • A photo of a severely burned person, which we'd cover with a warning screen for adults.
    • A photo or video of shootings, brutality or deadly car crashes.
  3. Content that may be sexually explicit or suggestive, such as pictures of people in see-through clothing. (We remove content that contains adult nudity or sexual activity.) We hide additional content from teens that doesn't contain explicit nudity or sexual activity, but could be considered sexually suggestive. For example, we would age restrict:
    • A post with near nudity, such as nudity covered by digital overlay.
    • A photo zoomed in on someone's buttocks.
    • A story with sexually suggestive language describing sexual encounters, including the use of sexual metaphors.
  4. Content that promotes the use of certain regulated products, such as tobacco or vaping products, adult products and services, or pharmaceutical drugs. (We remove content that attempts to sell or trade most regulated goods.) We hide content from teens that could influence them to engage in activities that are potentially harmful. For example, we would age restrict:
    • A post offering to sell tobacco, nicotine products, alcohol or firearms when shared by a legitimate brick-and-mortar business.
    • A story encouraging people to take psychedelic drugs (also known as entheogens) or cannabis products.
    • Images with recipes for alcoholic drinks.
    • A post selling weight loss products or services.
  5. Content that promotes or favourably depicts the use of weight loss products or services and cosmetic surgeries.
  6. Content shared by any non-recommendable account or entity (e.g. Groups or Pages, as outlined below).
Content that is associated with low-quality publishing, such as:
  1. Unoriginal content that is largely repurposed from another source without adding material value.
  2. Long captions unrelated to the underlying content and coordinated comment networks intended to artificially drive engagement and distribution.
False or misleading content, such as: In countries where Meta supports third-party fact-checking, content including claims that have been found to be false by independent fact-checkers. (We remove misinformation that could cause physical harm or suppress voting.)

Account and entity recommendations

We generally do not recommend accounts (including Profiles and Page admins) or entities (such as Pages, groups or events) that:
  1. Recently violated our Community Standards. This does not include accounts or entities that we otherwise remove from our platforms for violating our Community Standards.
  2. Repeatedly and/or have recently shared content (including the names or cover photos associated with groups or Pages) that we try not to recommend across the categories described in the Content Recommendations section above.
  3. Repeatedly engaged in misleading practices to build followings, such as purchasing "likes".
  4. In countries where Meta supports third-party fact-checking, have recently and repeatedly posted "False" and "Altered" information as determined by independent third-party fact-checkers.
  5. Are associated with offline movements or organisations that are tied to violence.
  6. Teens will not be recommended accounts that we've found regularly share age-inappropriate content, or if their name or bio suggests that the account is inappropriate for teens.
We may let people know when they're about to engage with an entity that meets any of the above criteria to help them make informed decisions.
A similar set of these guidelines applies to recommendations on Instagram. Those guidelines can be found in the Instagram Help Centre.

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