Meta is changing the name of Facebook’s News Feed, the main part of the service where users scroll to see what their friends and family have shared. From now on, it will simply be called “Feed,” according to a tweet from the company. The name “News Feed” has been around since the feature was first introduced more than 15 years ago.
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In some ways, it’s a huge change — Facebook is one of the most used platforms in the world, and Feed is its primary interface. On the other hand, it’s “just a name change to better reflect the different content people see in their Feeds,” according to an email sent to The Verge by Facebook spokesperson Dami Oyefeso. The change “doesn’t impact the broader app experience.”.
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The rebranding appears to reflect Facebook’s messy relationship with news distribution. Research has shown that misinformation gets far more engagement on the platform than fact-based reporting, and regulators are scrutinizing how big tech companies algorithmically rank content in their feeds. For its part, Meta said it is working to reduce the amount of political content that appears on people’s homepages.
Information about politics and current events, rather than your cousin’s engagement post, are the kinds of things you’d expect to find in something called the “News Feed.” So as you can imagine, changing the name of the section also gives us a different impression of the content the algorithm is displaying.
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The name change could also help eliminate potential confusion within the app. In a memo to employees, Meta said the name “News Feed” led people to believe it was a place for news instead of posts from friends.
Source of information: theverge.com
