Several Meta executives including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have long made it clear that outshining short-video platform TikTok is their current priority. To that effect, the social networking giant is now planning for a major redesign of the Facebook app, especially the main feed.

Facebook will heavily focus on recommended content from creators, people, and pages that users don’t follow, according to Facebook VP Tom Alison. The memo stated that the company’s goal is to make Facebook a “Discovery Engine” which would rely on recommendations like TikTok’s “For You” feed.

These recommendations are likely to come from “unfollowed” content and users would see lesser posts from family and friends in their feeds. The major app redesign plan would also include bringing back Messenger into the Facebook app to allow users to share more content through its “Discovery Engine.”

While it is still unclear how long it will take Facebook-parent Meta to deploy these changes, some minor changes are already being released for the popular photo-sharing app Instagram. It is worth noting that for a while now, Meta executives have indicated major changes to the Facebook app.

In April for instance, Zuckerberg claimed that the company was undergoing a major shift that would greatly change the feed dynamics to emphasize more AI-based recommendations instead of user’s social graphs. Alison’s memo now makes it clear how important the changes are for the company to catch up to TikTok.

However, a shift into more AI-based recommendations could also emerge to be problematic for Facebook. The company’s current algorithms have lately come under the spotlight for promoting misinformation and exploiting divisiveness.

In this context, Alison’s memo explained that the company is no longer prioritizing reducing negative experiences given its more linked to the overall product culture Facebook is trying to build by being people-centric, trustworthy, and unified.

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https://www.engadget.com/facebook-app-redesign-tiktok-recommendations-221943589.html