PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — There are thousands of West Virginia residents who use Facebook every day, but far fewer actually know how it works. The company hopes to change that with an open meeting to better explain how Facebook operates.
“This is the first one in the country actually,” said Tucker Bounds, Head of the News Feed Communications Division for Facebook. “We’re really excited about it. It came up in a meeting when we were talking about how to make people understand how Facebook works and how they can control the content they see with the tools available.”
The meeting is set for Wednesday evening at 5 p.m. at the Blennerhassett Hotel in Parkersburg. Exactly how the meeting will unfold is a little unknown. If the event is successful, Facebook hopes to have many more across the nation to help people better understand the service they use so often.
“People don’t have the best grounding of how content shows up in their news feed,” said Bounds. “We’re going to walk them through that so everybody can have a baseline understanding.”
Bounds says in many cases Facebook users have far more control over that content than they think because of tools Facebook has build into the service to control the flow of content.
“We think people actually have way more control over Facebook than they understand,” he explained. “We’re trying to help people better find and understand how their control over the experience works.”
Bounds admitted in an open meeting format, it’s likely other topics will come up and some of them will be sticky. This week Facebook has been in the news for the banning of four pages of a controversial right wing conspiracy theorist. The rules are pretty simple according to bonds.
“You need to be who you say you are and you need to be on Facebook not harassing, or attacking , or dehumanizing otehr people, “he explained. “We want people on Facebook to feel safe and be safe as they use the service.”