Facebook is preparing to split its News Feed into two, and is currently testing the upcoming change. The News Feed we know will be structured into one space for friends' updates and another space, Explore, which will contain posts from Pages.
The test is currently underway in six countries: Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia and Sri Lanka, and is in response to users wanting an easier way to see only posts from their friends and family, according to Facebook's Adam Mosseri.
“We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to discover relevant content from pages they’re not already connected to,” Mosseri said on the company’s blog. “The goal of this test is to understand whether people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We’ll hear what people say about their experience to understand if it’s worth continuing.”
Mosseri said the test will likely continue for months, but stressed that the company has no plans to make any changes, and that it will continue testing outside of the six countries. He also added that the company will not force pages to “pay to appear.”.
These changes, however, could lead companies to advertise more on the platform in an effort to showcase their pages.
The change has so far led to a “dramatic drop in the appearance of our page” according to Filip Struhárik, a journalist for the Slovak newspaper Dennik N.
“The 60 largest Slovak media pages have four times fewer interactions (likes, comments, and shares),” it said.
The two News Feeds will result in Facebook users seeing less news, likely in an effort to reduce the flow of hoaxes and fake news.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been planning to get rid of fake news on his platform anyway, with stronger detection. Along with detection, he planned to classify each piece of misinformation, make it easier for users to report fake news, and compare it to third-party articles.
Let's see what will happen with Facebook's new plan.
