Read more about Facebook will now show you more posts from friends and family than news on Business Standard. Last week, Zuckerberg said his resolution for 2018 was to ‘fix’ the social network he co-founded
said it’s making major changes to its flagship social network, shifting users’ news feeds back toward posts from friends and family and away from businesses and media outlets — a transition that is likely to mean people spend less time on the site. In a post Thursday, Chief Executive Officer said community feedback has shown that public content has been “crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.” The goal of the product teams will be to help Facebook’s more than 2 billion monthly users find content that will lead to more meaningful social interactions, he said. “By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on and some measures of engagement will go down,” wrote. “But I also expect the time you do spend on 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.” Facebook’s shares were down 2.5 per cent to $183 at 6:05 am in New York premarket trading. Last week, said his resolution for 2018 was to “fix” the social network he co-founded. His vow followed a year that saw come under sharp criticism for contributing to a climate of extreme political polarisation, the distribution of fake news and escalating privacy concerns. Last year, lawmakers berated Facebook, Alphabet’s Google and Twitter for failing to prevent Russian manipulation on their platforms during the 2016 US presidential election. “This is recognition of the issues they’ve faced with toxic content,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research Group. “People are frustrated with the Russia revelations and fake news and have taken it into their own hands and stopped engaging.” The Menlo Park, California-based company has kept revenue growing by consistently selling more advertising in its news feed, striking partnerships with media companies to distribute their stories, and including more video postings, which draw higher ad rates. Facebook’s latest changes don’t impact ads — only business and media-oriented content posted by pages and other people, according to a person familiar with the matter. European Union competition chief Margrethe Vestager said Friday that allowing advertisers to tailor political content to personal tastes on social media such as is a danger to democracy, according to interview in Vienna’s Der Standard newspaper. In a note earlier this week, Wieser reported Nielsen data showing that in September — the most recent month for which this data is available — core consumption failed to grow year-over-year for a second consecutive month. “ is already experiencing declines in consumption and the company is responding with these changes today,” Wieser said. “Good on — they are doing the right thing, long-term. It may not be good for the business in the short term.” Facebook’s popularity and user growth have skyrocketed since its founding in 2004, when it was a sort of online scrapbook and bulletin board for college students.
In the company’s early years, the news feed was a scrolling update about the personal activities of friends and family members. Months before the company went public in 2012, started featuring “sponsored story” ads in users’ feeds, and it rolled out mobile advertising that same year. Since then, annual sales have soared from $5.1 billion to an estimated $40.2 billion last year — and the news feed has become increasingly crowded with advertisements and posts from brands and publications.
