Instagram and Facebook want to bombard you with content posted from pages you don’t follow
Meta is keen to let you know that your Facebook and Instagram newsfeed will soon be dominated by content from people and companies you don’t follow.
Meta is keen to let you know that your Facebook and Instagram newsfeed will soon be dominated by content from people and companies you don’t follow. Or, better said, the contents of strangers will be even more prevalent, given that for several months now the algorithms have been giving precedence to viral contents, taking away space from those posted by your contacts.
And if you signed up on the two social networks to receive updates on your friends’ lives or to follow the contents of your favorite pages, well, it doesn’t matter because the company has different plans for you.
Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will “more than double” the amount of content recommended on Facebook and Instagram over the next year. The recommended contents are none other than the photos and (above all) the videos that the algorithms of the two social networks think you may like, based on your activities on the social network. These are contents that, by definition, come from spaces of the social network that you have not yet visited. So posts by influencers and pages you have never liked, but which Meta thinks you may like and, above all, that they can keep you for longer with your eyes on the screen.
It is the TikTok model , the app of the Chinese ByteDance that has built its fortune thanks to an infinite newsfeed, capable of showing every day millions of contents selected according to the personality and tastes of each individual user. A model that ensures that each user has a surgically customized newsfeed, and that two users with different tastes never see the same things. This formula has allowed TikTok to climb the rankings of the most downloaded and used applications every day, completely conquering the so-called Gen Z. By now TikTok is no longer just the application of kids: it is used across the board by all generations. Instagram and Facebook certainly couldn’t stand by and watch. And here’s how we got to the current situation: Meta wants tiktokicize its social networks, hoping to replicate the success of the rival application.
The invasion of recommended content is just the tip of the iceberg. Instagram is already starting to focus less and less on photos, giving priority to videos . Obviously we are not talking about the elaborate videos and several tens of minutes long, on a YouTube model, but about the disposable clips of up to 30 seconds. Just like the ones that are shared on TikTok.
Meta, on this, does not intend to step back: “our artificial intelligence is able to identify content that people find interesting,” explained Zuckerberg. “This causes the quality of the feed and the time spent by users on the application to increase a lot.”
