Facebook to rank comments to make conversations meaningful

In a move to make conversations on public posts more meaningful, Facebook has rolled out an update where it will rank comments to promote those that are most relevant to users.

Facebook will now start showing comments on public posts more prominently when the comments have interactions from the page or the person who originally posted or 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," Justine Shen, Product Manager at Facebook, said in a statement on Friday.

The users 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 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.

"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," said Facebook.