Here Comes Another Facebook Overhaul That’ll Leave News Publishers Scrambling

Stacey Greenberg, the editor-in-chief at a regional food and dining magazine in Memphis, needed little prompting from me before confessing her annoyance with changes in the works at Facebook and Instagram, both of which are in the process of overhauling their apps to make them more video-heavy in the vein of Tiktok.

First, the top editor at Edible Memphis told to me, Instagram wanted her and creators like her to become engaging photographers, essentially (“And I got good at that”). Now, to her chagrin, she feels compelled to “be a videographer, too,” lest her magazine’s posts lose out in the Darwinian scramble for mindshare as part of the new attention economy built around ephemeral video. “I’m annoyed, but up to the challenge, I guess,” she told me.

Not that there’s much of an alternative, really. Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire has rammed through these kinds of like-it-or-not paradigm shifts before. And yesterday’s pivot to video is today’s pivot to TikTok, with the Meta-owned properties scrambling to capture some of the magic of the latest internet fad in order to prop up a comparatively fusty, 18-year-old company. What that means: Get used to seeing more random ephemera in your main Facebook and Instagram feeds, in line with TikTok’s algorithmically-sorted For You page.

Zuckerberg himself announced this new direction for his Meta properties via — what else? — a Facebook post on July 21, while this overhaul of the company’s core experiences also dominated Meta’s latest earnings report on Wednesday, July 27. Zuck’s post led to at least one obituary for the era of the traditional social network, which will give way to a user experience that nudges more people toward chaotic, TikTok-style randomness.

Zuckerberg lieutenant Adam Mosseri, the top executive over Instagram, likewise recorded a video this week basically saying the same thing. Get used to it, was Mosseri’s larger point — this is the world of bite-sized video snippets, and we’re all just living in it.

During Meta’s earnings call for analysts on Wednesday, Zuckerberg said that around 15% of content that users see in their Facebook feeds now — and a little more than that on Instagram — are from accounts that those users aren’t currently following. He estimates those numbers to double soon.

So, what does all this mean for journalists and news publishers?

News on Facebook

To answer that, we should first define what we mean when we talk about news that exists on Facebook’s platform. Users can, of course, “follow” the pages of journalists and publishers whose work they want to keep up with. There’s also a dedicated News Tab, which serves up a curated mix of news content tailored to each individual user.

Rearchitecting the Facebook and Instagram apps and web experiences means that, going forward, the main feed that users are presented with will be packed with more TikTok-like content from accounts that a user doesn’t follow. That last part is incredibly important. Because keeping up with friends, family, and the like will now be shunted off to a feed that the users will need to toggle over to.

Content from Facebook pages — i.e., pages including those of news publishers — will now have to compete even harder for a user’s attention … when they even bother to open the newly separated feeds at all.

As for the News Tab? A Meta spokesperson told me the News tab “is not affected” by these changes. Which is to say it still, well, “exists.” The spokesperson also told me that if a user wanted to, they could pin the News tab to their shortcut bar. Otherwise, it remains accessible through the user’s bookmarks.

Publishers bracing for another Facebook change

Which is all fine and good, except — if Meta is successful with this new user behavior it’s trying to encourage? Then the future promises a lot more mindless scrolling of random miscellany. And, in the zero-sum game of user time and attention, that means correspondingly less engagement with … everything that’s not random miscellany.

For that matter, Facebook internally has begun talking internally about de-emphasizing efforts around the Facebook News tab and allocating resources away from it. Campbell Brown, a former journalist who leads global media partnerships for Facebook, penned a memo to employees stating as much.

“We regularly evaluate the products we offer to ensure we’re focused on the most meaningful experiences for people on Facebook and the future of our business,” a Meta spokesperson shared with me, in response to the news about Brown’s memo. “We remain committed to the success of creators, and are doing even more to ensure they can find audiences on Facebook and grow engaged communities there.”

The spokesperson also insisted to me that “recommended” content won’t overtake users’ overall Facebook experience.

The fact of the matter, though, is that it looks like winter is coming (again) for non-video content from news publishers, which are going to have to compete against random posts from around the platform that Facebook wants to put in front of users.

At least publishers can take some measure of comfort, small as it may be, in the fact that even some the biggest influencers across Instagram and Facebook — like Kylie Jenner — are nonplussed at the company’s never-ending fetishization with whatever hot app is the next flavor of the moment. “Stop trying to be TikTok,” Jenner lamented in an Instagram post, styled as a mini-open letter to the company.