Facebook to update News Feed for displaying posts from friends and family first

Facebook has announced that it will be soon updating the News Feed. The social networking site will now give priority to posts from friends and family and display them first. The social networking site also stated that they will now prioritise posts which “spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people”.

 

Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the change via a Facebook post and said, “recently, we've gotten feedback from our community that public content -- posts from businesses, brands and media -- is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other. Now, I want to be clear: By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. 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.”

 

The news of new change comes soon after the Facebook CEO said that his new year’s resolution is to fix Facebook. As Zuckerberg said, content engagement of public pages and posts could go down as people might spend lesser time scrolling through their News Feed. However, articles and videos which prompt users to react upon, share and/or participate in discussions will also get priority in the revamped News Feed. Facebook also says that people will still be able to see posts from the pages they follow if they choose to see them first in their News Feed preferences. 

 

A previous report tipped that Facebook is testing a local news section on its platform. The new section is supposedly live and accessible in six US cities and displays city-specific local news, events and announcements. You can read more about it here.