Facebook drops ‘News’ from ‘News Feed’

Meta is altering the identify of Facebook’s News Feed, the first a part of the service that customers scroll by way of to see what their family and friends have shared. Going ahead, it’ll simply be referred to as the “Feed,” in accordance with a tweet from the company on Tuesday. The “News Feed” identify had been in place for the reason that characteristic was first launched greater than 15 years in the past.

In some methods, it’s a large change — Facebook is likely one of the world’s most-used platforms, and the Feed is its essential interface. On the opposite hand, it’s “just a name change to better reflect the diverse content people see on their Feeds,” in accordance with an electronic mail despatched to The Verge by Facebook spokesperson Dami Oyefeso. The change “does not impact the app experience more broadly.”

There’s rather a lot in a reputation, although, and the rebranding appears to replicate Facebook’s messy relationship with distributing information tales. Research has proven that misinformation will get considerably extra engagement on the platform than fact-based reporting, and regulators have been trying into how massive tech firms algorithmically rank content material of their feeds. For its half, Meta has said it’s engaged on decreasing the quantity of political content material that reveals up on folks’s homepages — its personal analysis urged that the News Feed’s algorithm may push even politicians to take extra excessive positions.

Information about politics and present occasions, fairly than posts out of your cousin about their engagement, are the varieties of belongings you’d look forward to finding in one thing referred to as a “news feed.” Personally, that makes it exhausting to not learn the identify change as a delicate reframing of how severely I ought to take the content material the algorithm is serving.

The identify change may additionally assist clear up potential confusion throughout the app. Over a decade and a half in the past, when the News Feed was launched, Facebook didn’t even have a News tab that customers may combine it up with. In a memo to employees, Meta stated the “News Feed” identify made folks suppose it was a spot for information tales as a substitute of posts from buddies.