Meta rebranded Facebook’s News Feed after more than 15 years.
META — After more than 15 years, the social media giant announced that it is changing the name of Facebook’s News Feed.
The company is changing the name of Facebook’s News Feed, the primary part of the service that Facebook users scroll through in order to see what their families and friends have shared.
Going forward, Facebook’s News Feed will just be called the “Feed”, according to a tweet from Facebook on Tuesday.
Starting today, our News Feed will now be known as “Feed.” Happy scrolling! pic.twitter.com/T6rjO9qzFc
— Facebook App (@facebookapp) February 15, 2022
Facebook’s “News Feed” name had been in place since the said feature was first introduced more than a decade and a half ago. It’s a massive change in some ways as Facebook is one of the world’s most-used platforms and Facebook’s Feed is its main interface.
On the other hand, Facebook spokesperson Dami Oyefeso said in an email sent to The Verge that it’s “just a name change” in order to better reflect the diverse content users see on their Feeds and the change “does not impact the app experience more broadly”.
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Based on a report on The Verge, research has shown that misinformation gets significantly more engagement on Facebook than fact-based reporting, and regulators have been looking into how big tech firms algorithmically rank content in their feeds.
Meta, for its part, has said that it’s working on reducing the amount of political content that shows up on users’ homepages — its own research suggested that the algorithm of Facebook’s News Feed could push even politicians to take more extreme positions.
Information about current events and politics, rather than posts from families and friends, are the types of things Facebook users would expect to find in something called a “news feed”.
Also, the rebrand could help clear up potential confusion within the Facebook app. When Facebook’s News Feed was introduced over a decade and a half ago, Facebook didn’t also have a News tab that its users could mix it up with.
Meta said in a memo to employees that the “News Feed” name made users think it was a place for news stories instead of posts from families and friends.
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