Is Facebook turning its back on friends and family?

New Facebook Home Page Puts Businesses First

Facebook’s new Home Page puts your friends and family in the background

Here’s something that may very well change the way you use Facebook!

On July 21st, 2022, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta and owner of Facebook announced that “we’re making it easier for you to control what content you see and discover on Facebook. We’re introducing Feeds, a new tab that lets you easily see the most recent posts from your friends, Pages, and groups. You can curate a favorites list of the friends and Pages you care about most and filter their content in this new tab. We’re also naming the primary tab — the first thing you see when you open the app — Home.”

Home is the starting point for connection, entertainment, and discovery on Facebook.

For the cynics out there, this move can only be interpreted as a decision by Facebook to ditch friends and family for business, an assumption that may not be as removed from reality as we might otherwise hope.

Indeed, the social network’s home page will now be devoted to content chosen by artificial intelligence based on the presumed tastes of users, as opposed to your own! 

Translated into plain English, a “machine” will now decide what populates your home page.

We have seemingly arrived full throttle into a world increasingly driven by AI.

So if you’re using Facebook to check in with your family and friends, from now on, you’ll have to look elsewhere to see their latest posts, more precisely in a new tab placed at the top (on Android) or the bottom (on iOS) of the screen of your smartphone.

The home page will instead now feature a new “personalized” feed, not chosen by you, but by a “classification system resulting from “machine learning”.  

What this does mean of course is that Facebook will in effect relegate to the background the linear navigation within your feed which would have otherwise shown posts by selected contributors – namely your relatives and friends.

A way for Meta to give a facelift to Facebook: if the social network remains the most used in the world with 2.8 billion users, it struggles to seduce the new generations, more attracted by Instagram, YouTube, or, above all, Tik Tok.

Indeed, Tik Tok has the particularity of offering its users – half of whom are under 25 – a continuous stream of videos selected by an algorithm according to the users’ supposed tastes. Rather than inviting them to search for specific content or to subscribe to a particular creator.

With this new Facebook home page update, Meta, therefore, intends to offer a “discovery engine”, supposed to allow “to find new content and to subscribe to new creators through recommendations”.

And you thought you were in control!

You can download the report here: