Mark Zuckerberg and different Meta executives have made it clear for a while that competing with TikTok is their prime precedence. Now, we have now extra particulars about how they plan to fully overhaul the Facebook app to perform that.
The social community is engaged on a serious redesign of Facebook’s major feed that will closely emphasize advisable content material from pages, creators and other people you don’t already observe, in line with a memo from a Facebook government that was revealed by The Verge.
The memo, from Tom Alison who heads up the Facebook app at Meta, states that the aim is to shift Facebook right into a “Discovery Engine,” which might closely depend on suggestions, much like TikTok’s “For You” feed. Recommendations would primarily come from “unconnected” content material, together with Reels, and customers would see fewer posts from family and friends of their feeds. The plan would additionally carry Messenger’s inbox again into the Facebook app in an effort to encourage customers to share extra content material from stated “Discovery Engine.”
It’s not clear how lengthy it should take Meta to implement these adjustments, a few of which mirror adjustments already occurring at Instagram. But it’s not the primary time Meta executives have hinted at large adjustments to come back in Facebook’s app, and even the primary time we’ve heard about an upcoming pivot from social community to “Discovery Engine.” Zuckerberg stated in April that the corporate was within the midst of a “major shift” that will change the dynamics of feeds to emphasise AI-driven suggestions over customers’ social graphs.
Still, the memo from Alison makes clear simply how vital the brand new priorities are for the corporate, which is desperately attempting to catch as much as TikTok.
But the shift to extra suggestions may be problematic for the corporate. The firm’s present advice algorithms have been blamed for exploiting divisiveness and selling misinformation. While Alison instructed The Verge that there could be stricter guidelines for advisable content material, the corporate has typically struggled to implement its personal guidelines. And, notably, in his memo Alison states that the corporate is altering the way in which it views its obligation to scale back “negative experiences.”
“‘Reducing negative experiences’ has been removed as a product priority since it’s more aptly tied to the product culture we are trying to build throughout our approach of being ‘Trustworthy,’ ‘People-Centric,’ and ‘Unified,’” Alison wrote. “Our focus is doing this holistically across all of our products as a permanent part of our culture as opposed to a short-term priority.”