Facebook plans major changes to news feed

Facebook said on Thursday that it will start to show users more posts from their friends and family in the News Feed, a move that means people will see fewer posts from publishers and brands.

According to Facebook, the move is designed to encourage people to interact more with the stuff that they actually do see. The thinking is that you’re probably more likely to comment and discuss a post shared from a family member than one shared by a business you follow.

“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,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a post on Thursday.

Then he added something else surprising: Facebook expects the change will mean that people will spend less time using the service.

“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,” he wrote. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.”

The announcement is huge for a couple of reasons:

It’s bad news for publishers who rely on Facebook for traffic, or a business who uses it as a form of organic marketing. Facebook is very clearly telling these businesses their content won’t spread as far in News Feed, and many publishers spend lots of time and resources creating stuff intended to do just that.

Facebook admitting that people will likely spend less time on Facebook has to be sour news for investors. The more time people spend on Facebook, the more ads they consume, and the more money Facebook can make. Less time, at least on paper, seems like it will correlate to less revenue.

For years, critics have blasted Facebook for reinforcing ideologies by showing users content and viewpoints they already agree with, creating a bubble mentality that some believe helped fuel the rise of certain hate groups such as the alt-right. Agents of Russia capitalized on this dynamic and used Facebook (as well as other outlets like Twitter and YouTube) to sow unrest in an attempt to manipulate the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.

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