Facebook wants to know if ‘this post feels like an ad’

Facebook’s running a new survey about on its newsfeed. The topic, appropriately enough, is its newsfeed and whether or not the posts from pages on the platform feel like adverts.

Once you’ve agreed to take the survey, which was spotted by AllFacebook’s David Cohen, you’ll see a dialogue box like the one below, which says:

On the next few pages, you’ll see some Facebook posts. Above each post, there will be a statement and a rating scale. Rate how much you agree with the statement for each post.

The survey then serves up posts from around 15 pages, all of them asking the same question: “How much do you agree with this statement? This post feels like an ad.”

The answer options, in typical survey format, are as follows:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Neither agree nor disagree
• Agree
• Strongly agree

Some of the posts are undoubtedly ads, while others are definitively not.

It’s not entirely clear whether the survey is aimed at helping Facebook identify pages that are heavily pushing out ads to people’s newsfeeds so that it can target them for its paid advertising products or whether it’s trying to see how people perceive ads on Facebook.

It is however hardly surprising that it’s trying to get user feedback on News Feed. It has, after all, spent the past couple of years making making tweak after tweak to the product in a bid to get people to spend more time on it and, by extension, to extract more value from it.