Mark Zuckerberg and other Meta executives have long targeted TikTok as its biggest competitor. After changing the appearance of the Instagram application to look like TikTok, now it's the turn of the Facebook application to be overhauled.
According to an internal memo from Tom Alison, who heads Facebook's apps division at Meta, the tech giant is preparing major changes to Facebook's feed that prioritize content recommendations from creators, pages, and other people that users don't follow.
The memo says the main goal of this change is to establish a 'Discovery Engine' for Facebook that will rely on recommended content, much like the 'For You' page on TikTok.
In the memo, Facebook said that the realm of social media was changing and that they needed systems like discovery engines to help users find interesting content, regardless of whether the content was created by people they follow or not.
Recommendations will come from 'unconnected' content, including Reels, so users will see less content from their family and friends in the feed.
With this change, the Facebook app will be filled with Stories and Reels tabs at the top, while content recommendations will be displayed below it. The group will be renamed to 'Communities' and the feed will focus on showing short video content.
As part of this grand plan, Meta will also bring Messenger inboxes back to the Facebook app to encourage users to share interesting content they find.
It's not yet known when these changes will take effect, but this isn't the first time Meta has given an indication of a major change to come to the Facebook app.
In April, Zuckerberg mentioned the term discovery engine in a blog post, saying that Facebook was in the midst of a major change that would change feed dynamics to emphasize content recommendations based on AI.
But the shift in the function of feeds as recommendation engines could be a new problem for Facebook and Meta. Currently, Facebook's recommendation algorithm continues to be in the spotlight because it is accused of promoting misinformation and divisive content.