Facebook is rolling out a feature that will help explain to its 2.32 billion monthly active users how it picks adverts and posts to display in their news feed.

The company hopes that this tool will help ease users’ fears that the network is eavesdropping on them via their mobile phone microphones. The tool will explain in layman’s terms the most important factors that decide whether and when they are shown content on the platform.

But the bulk of the “tens of thousands” of signals the company analyses to determine the content will remain hidden. Facebook said this is to avoid flooding people with potentially overwhelming, irrelevant information.

When rolled out worldwide next month, users will be presented with an option to click on “Why am I seeing this?” in a contextual menu for each post.

This function will then show them general information about the source of the posts – for example, two accounts are friends, or that the user follows the page that posted the content.

It will also show more comprehensive information as to why a particular post was placed in the users’ news feed. Facebook’s examples included “you’ve liked [this friend’s] posts more than posts from others”, “you’ve commented on posts with photos more than other media types”, or “this post in [this group] is popular compared to other posts you’ve seen”.

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Facebook hopes this will help users to understand why they are being shown certain content, and to take action to hide or mute them if they want. In addition, a similar set of information will be offered for adverts on Facebook.

This will include the advertisers’ “customaudiences”, which allows businesses to upload their customer lists. These lists include names, email addresses, or phone numbers of people they have contacted elsewhere. They can then target these customers with adverts on the platform.

John Hegeman, the head of Facebook’s news feed, said that the changes were a small step rather than a finished offering. He explained: “We don’t think this is going to solve everything,” adding that the company wanted to know how it could build on these changes.

Hegemen continued saying that this tool was an important addition to the platform as it would help dispel persistent conspiracy theories that Facebook is spying on its users via their phone’s microphones in order to target them with better ads.

“We don’t listen to people on their microphones. But people do a lot of different things on Facebook: they indicate what things they’re interested in etc. That, I think, means you often have a very good understanding of their interests.

“Because people don’t always understand how that works, they often reach these other types of conclusion, like ‘oh, Facebook must be doing this other thing to figure out what to show to me’.

“So our hope is that when you see something, and want to know why Facebook showed it to you, then you’re able to use these types of tools to find out.”