Deleting a friend request removes the request, but does allow the sender to resend it in the future. In addition to accepting the request, the user has the option of declining the friend request or hiding it using the 'Not Now' feature. The two people are Facebook friends once the receiving party accepts the friend request. 'Friending' someone on the platform is the act of sending another user a 'friend request' on Facebook. On March 7, 2013, Facebook announced a redesigned newsfeed. Furthermore, the community feed (containing recent actions by the user's friends) contained options to instantly select whether to hear more or less about certain friends or applications. On their personal Feeds (now integrated with Walls), users were given the option of removing updates from any application as well as choosing the size they show up on the page. With the introduction of the 'New Facebook' in early February 2010 came a complete redesign of the pages, several new features and changes to News Feeds. Currently, users may prevent friends from seeing updates about several types of especially private activities, although other events are not customizable in this way. Thereafter, users were able to control what types of information were shared automatically with friends. In response to this dissatisfaction, creator Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology for the site's failure to include appropriate customizable privacy features. This tracking is often casually referred to as 'Facebook-Stalking'. Others were concerned that the News Feed made it too easy for other people to track activities like changes in relationship status, events, and conversations with other users. Many users complained that the News Feed was too cluttered with excess information. Initially, the addition of the News Feed caused some discontent among Facebook users.

In response to users' criticism, Facebook later updated the News Feed to allow users to view recent stories first. In 2011, Facebook updated the News Feed to show top stories and most recent stories in one feed, and the option to highlight stories to make them top stories, as well as to un-highlight stories. Unlike in the News Feed, the user can delete events from the Mini Feed after they appear so that they are no longer visible to profile visitors. An integral part of the News Feed interface is the Mini Feed, a news stream on the user's profile page that shows updates about that user. News Feed also shows conversations taking place between the walls of a user's friends. This has enabled spammers and other users to manipulate these features by creating illegitimate events or posting fake birthdays to attract attention to their profile or cause. News Feed highlights information that includes profile changes, upcoming events, and birthdays, among other updates. The new layout, by contrast, created an alternative home page in which users saw a constantly updated list of their friends' Facebook activity. Originally, when users logged into Facebook, they were presented with a customizable version of their own profile.

On September 6, 2006, Ruchi Sanghvi announced a new home page feature called News Feed.

Using a secret method (initially known as EdgeRank), Facebook selects a handful of updates to actually show users every time they visit their feed, out of an average of 1500 updates they can potentially receive.

The news feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network.

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