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Does This Post Make My Ad Look Fat?

Facebook wants to know.

Gil C / Shutterstock
Peter Kafka
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.

Facebook doesn’t seem to have a lot of problems right now — at the very least, financially speaking. But it can always improve.

Hence a new poll it is sending out to some users — like Re/code’s own Jason Del Rey — asking them for opinions about “organic” posts from their friends, and ads from … advertisers.

The question: Does this post feel like an ad?

This ought to be fairly self-explanatory. But just in case, here’s the opening screen of the survey, followed by two examples of ads that appeared in Jason’s feed, along with a piece of “real” content from his feed. See if you can tell the difference!

facebook survey intro

It’s hard to imagine that either Facebook or its users are having a hard time delineating the difference between these, but it’s always interesting to watch them work this stuff out right in front of us.

I would think a more interesting survey would be one that asked users for their thoughts on “real” content that publishers were paying to promote in the feed — and/or the difference between “real” videos their friends are posting and video ads, which we’re going to see much more of very soon.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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