Mark Zuckerberg Plans Major Canges In Facebook News Feed, That Will Affect 2 Billion+ People & Millions Of Businesses
Preferably, content that sparks communications with family and friends who use the site will be featured, explained chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook Official Page.
All businesses and companies on Facebook may see the organic reach on their posts decrease as a result, the firm confirmed.
The changes will take effect over the coming weeks.
We've gotten feedback from our community that public content - posts from businesses, brands, and media is crowding out the personal consequences that lead us to connect more with each other, wrote Mr. Zuckerberg.
He said that he and his team felt a responsibility to make sure Facebook was good for people's wellbeing.
If the public content is to be promoted, it will now have to be seen to encourage community interaction - as happens within the tight-knit groups that discuss TV programmes and sports, he said.
Another example is given by Facebook in a separate post was live video feeds, which tend to create much discussion.
By executing these changes, I expect that the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down, added Mr. Zuckerberg.
But I also expect that the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.
In the last post, Mr. Zuckerberg had promised that to fix Facebook in 2018, saying he wanted to ensure that users were defended from abuse and that time spent on the site would be time well spent.
He also promised that to defend Facebook from nation states.
Analysis has recently suggested that some actors, including Russia, have tried to operate content on the social network.
It's clearly a significant change, said Laura Hazard Owen at Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab.
It's going to affect all publishers a lot on facebook, we're going to be viewing a lot less news organically pop up in our news feeds.
Ms. Owen added, however, that Facebook had not been very clear about what sort of reviews the site's renewed algorithms would prioritize.
It might end up being the most controversial data that generates heated communications, she recommended, or simply content removed in from group pages where users engage with others on specific topics.
POWERFUL ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Given up-to-date public scrutiny, the social network was currently in the hot seat, said Gabriel Kahn from the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
Facebook is in the center of all of these fires it's trying to put out, it's trying to reassert its warm and fuzzy brand value that it has always tried to put forth, he told that to BBC.
Mr. Kahn added the update from Mr. Zuckerberg was a clear acknowledge that Facebook wielded extraordinary power over the health of society.
However, he claimed that the new advantages could further decline the organic views and the nature of discussions.
There should be the public discussion about the values they're applying to that algorithm, he said.
ANALYSIS
By Dave Lee, North America Technology Correspondent
In various ways this is Facebook getting back to its roots, making your news feed more about what your friends are making, planning and thinking, rather than content they have shared.
For the first time, Mark Zuckerberg is executing a major decision that goes against one of his believe: any change to the network must have the goal of improving engagement on Facebook. This changes, he admits, will likely lead to people spending less time on the site.
But after a tough 2017, Mr. Zuckerberg is perhaps learning now that in the wake of the fake news scandal, and a platform overflowing with slow clickbait, not all contents is a good content.
Faced with the big and great task of having to do more to modify what's happening on his network, Mr. Zuckerberg may have come to the summing-up that having a news free-for-all is becoming more headache than it's worth.
For news companies and publications, this might spell bad news: a lot of traffic comes from Facebook. With less influence, expect some viral sites to very immediately go out of business.
The new change, of course, will cost Facebook more money. Mr. Zuckerberg warned investors at the end of last year that contending fake news would hurt the firm's bottom line. The question now is: by how much?
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