If you are still one of those who regularly uses Facebook, you’d know how utterly irritating it becomes to scroll through your News feed, to find posts from groups, pages and what not. Well, seems like waning interest in Facebook has finally led to the company testing a new layout, that would allow more posts from your ‘friends’ to show up.
This new News Feed is currently in testing, and would go live on Facebook’s app for English-speaking users. It basically adds three sub-menus into Facebook’s menu for managing what shows up in the News Feed: friends and family, groups and pages and public figures. Users in the test can choose to keep the ratio of those posts in their feed at “normal” or change it to more or less, depending on their preferences.
Anyone in the test can do the same for topics, designating things they are interested in or stuff they’d rather not see. In a blog post, Facebook says the test will affect “a small percentage of people” around the world before the test expands gradually in the next few weeks.
Additionally, Facebook would also expand on a tool, that would allow advertisers to stay away from getting clubbed with content on certain topics. So for example, a brand could choose its ads to not be placed alongside content related to politics, social issues among others. This has become ever so crucial, considering how brands globally, are facing political and social backlash whenever they seem to take out an innovative new ad.
All of these changes, though not massive, will immensely help lift the overall Facebook experience. As mentioned already, Facebook is no more the preferred social media choice for most active users, considering the barrage of unnecessary content that continues to pop up on news feeds. Facebook (and its new parent Meta) are already under severe regulatory and public pressure, as it continues to get accused of promoting misinformation. These changes would certainly help that cause as well.
