Facebook forsakes friends and family to compete with TikTok

Users who want to see the most recent posts from friends, family and favorite pages and groups will find them on a new “Feeds” tab. Users will be able to create a Favorites list of people and groups they most want to see content from.

“The app will still open to a personalized feed on the Home tab, where our discovery engine will recommend the content we think you’ll care most about,” Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a post. “But the Feeds tab will give you a way to customize and control your experience further.”

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Facebook, which last year renamed itself Meta, has been aggressively investing in its video products to compete for young users against ByteDance’s video-sharing app TikTok, which has become the world’s fastest-growing social media platform through its personalized delivery of short, engaging videos. Zuckerberg has said that investing in and figuring out how to make more money from its similar product, Reels, is a top priority for the company.

During the final three months of last year, Facebook reported that it lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history, sending its stock price plummeting. While the social media outlet’s user growth numbers held stable early this year, company executives have said they are focusing their energies on winning the attention of young people.

In contrast, TikTok has seen its U.S. user base soar to more than 110 million.

Facebook’s strategy for figuring out which content users most want to see in their news feeds has been evolving for years. In the mid-2010s, the company was most focused on increasing the amount of time users spent on the site and often elevated clickbait articles and professionally produced videos into users’ feeds.

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In 2018, Facebook changed its recommendation algorithm to prioritize posts that encouraged engagement, which meant elevating content from friends and family but also divisive content that sparked intense emotional reactions, according to a trove of documents shared with regulators last year by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

Since then, the company has continued modifying the way users find new content. Earlier this year, it began offering users of its photo-sharing app Instagram two new ways to view content including by catching up on the most recent content from their favorite friends and creators or content from accounts they follow.