Facebook to make big changes to user news feed, to prioritise social interests over commercial ones

Facebook opened its arms to the global community more than a decade ago, and when people embraced it back, the world became a very smaller place. Facebook, which started as a social media platform to bring people closer to each other, started straying away from its main purpose. Since its IPO in 2012, Facebook provided commercial entities, business, and brands to make use of its social media platforms to market their products and services. And the newsfeed on people’s profiles started appearing more like a big long advertisement, rather than a social media page meant for bringing people closer.

But in the light of the recent backlash, the social media website has been receiving on the internet from the scientific community, as well as the common user base has prompted the tech giants to take a look under their hood and fine tune things, for the coming future.

Somewhere around mid-December, an announcement made Facebook top heads confirmed that the company is implementing measures to curb problems such as online harassments and online bullying on their social media platform. By introducing an AI-based facial recognition system for their social media site the company was aiming to upgrade user security and privacy. Going in the same direction, this new decision to limit the accessibility of commercial entities and business from hijacking your newsfeed comes as a major development in the recent times. The new announcement came in the form of a post by Facebook COO, Mark Zuckerberg.

In a heartfelt note like manner, the man contemplated, how his idea has become something very different from what he had hoped for when Facebook started. Which is why in order to make things right, the company will start concentrating their efforts towards making the user newsfeed more about friends and family, rather than about the businesses looking out for consumers.

In order to achieve this particular goal, they will use signals to how people react to, comment, share posts to determine how high they appear in News Feed. By doing this, the user news feed will contain more of posts that will spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. Thus prioritizing posts from friends and family above/over public content. In other words, this simply means the pages and public content creators, will be given the limited space in the news feed, and Facebook will show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.

Where on one hand this means reduced outreach of such business to the user, but it does not mean that they will be completely eradicated from the social media space. As for users, who have subscribed to pages and feeds from, businesses and other entities, will continue to receive the updates from them, shall the user choose, to allow those feeds to appear above other posts on their feed. So all in all, it can be said that Facebook is looking forward to making the website more of social media platform, rather than a social-business platform in 2018.