Changes to Facebook’s News Feed

This month Mark Zuckerburg, a co-founder of Facebook and currently its chairman and chief executive officer, announced that he intends to “Fix Facebook.”  He wants the time people spend on Facebook to be more worthwhile and engaging.  He wants people spending less time scrolling through content and more time interacting with family and friends around topics of interest.

On his own Facebook Page he wrote:

Based on this, we’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.

We started making changes in this direction last year, but it will take months for this new focus to make its way through all our products. The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups.

As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.

It is not clear yet how Facebook will achieve Zuckerburg’s new goal.  He admits that this could mean that people will be spending less time on Facebook, but that the time spent will be more worthwhile. While this could impact Facebook’s bottom line in the short term, he believes that it will be good for people and for business in the long term.  We will have to see about that.

Take a moment to answer the question below and let’s see how interactive our Facebook usage is at this point.

If you want to comment on this aspect of Facebook and how you use it, of whether or not you think that Facebook needs this fix, please do that in the comments at the bottom of the page. Thank you.

If you would like to read Zuckerburg’s full statement on Facebook 2018 and the many comments it generated, click here.