Facebook goes old-school, will show more content from friends and family in News Feed now

Facebook is overhauling its News Feed so that you see more posts from your friends and family. In other words, the social media giant is turning back the clock to a time when things were simpler, focussing around what your close ones were doing rather than knowing everything else happening around the world, especially if they were fake. The company announced that it will be making updates to ranking so that users see updates from friends and family prominently on their feed. The changes will be rolled out in the coming month.
Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri announced through a blog post that the update will “prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. To do this, we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about, and show these posts higher in feed.”
The changes will look to de-prioritise posts from business, brands and media as they tend to crowd up the feed and increase visibility of posts from friends and family. This, the company says, will promote more “meaningful” interactions. “We feel a responsibility to make sure our services aren’t just fun to use, but also good for people’s well-being,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post. The Facebook founder has made it his personal goal for 2018 to make sure time spent on Facebook is “time well spent.”
Notably, this isn’t the first time Facebook has tried to shuffle its News Feed. Two years ago, the company made changes to its algorithm to promote posts from friends and family over posts from publishers after doing something similar a year before that in 2015. These changes in the past have worked out for Facebook as publishers have seen a declining in traffic generated on the site. This is one of the reasons businesses and media shifted towards videos as Facebook tweaked its algorithm to promote videos over text-based content.
One expects that Facebook’s aim to get its News Feed in order (once again) will fix the nagging issue of fake news, something the company faced a lot of criticism for pretty much throughout 2017. Whether the changes remain permanent or is just a temporary solution remains to be seen. Zuckerberg in his post says that he expects the changes introduced this year will bring down the time spent by people on Facebook. “By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” he said. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”