Facebook used to be cool, believe it or not.
But a lot has changed since the early days when news feeds were filled with status updates and photos from friends. Facebook is crowded with brands and pages trying to grab attention. It has become a place where people, especially his teens and young adults, feel uneasy about sharing their lives.
Facebook has been trying to fix the news feed for the past four years by making it about friends and family, but this time it’s going in a different direction. This new “discovery engine” push has become like his TikTok that got his Facebook attention of the younger generation, desperately trying to win back.
The result is a “modern vision of how we will serve the next generation of people using Facebook apps,” said Tom Alison, head of Facebook apps at Meta, in July 2021. In-depth podcast interview since taking office.
In the fifth episode of the new season of , we examine the past, present, and future of your Facebook feed. land of giants, the Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential technology companies of our time. This season, Recode and The Verge team up for his seven episodes to tell the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming his Meta, featuring interviews with current and former executives.
This episode also features Nick Clegg, Meta’s Chief Policy Officer, on what it means to have more control over what billions of users see on their Facebook and Instagram feeds every day.
“Weirdly, we’re going to do what we’ve been arguing for a long time,” Clegg said. “If you hear this [former Facebook employee and whistleblower] Stories like Francis Haugen…that’s so-so, they’re just spoon-feeding hate speech to people. It was driven by our system, but it was also driven by their own choices, who their friends were, what groups they belonged to, what content. they get involved and so on.
But that’s changing with the new Discovery Engine strategy. To make Facebook and Instagram like TikTok, Meta uses AI to serve users with more content from strangers. What does this push mean for the future of Facebook and how we use it?
listen to episode 5 of Land of Giants: Facebook / Meta DisruptionCatch the first four episodes on , Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.
