You’ll see changes if you open Facebook or Instagram. Social applications that have traditionally been characterised by the friends and family you choose to connect with are being redesigned to include more viral postings, particularly video, from influencers, celebrities, and random strangers.
If it sounds familiar, it’s not by chance. Facebook is rushing to catch up with TikTok, the enormously popular startup that is reshaping social media.
“Everyone’s eyes are drawn to TikTok and the way it works right now,” said Michael Sayman, a software engineer who has worked on initiatives to win over adolescents at Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
In only a few years, China’s ByteDance’s short video app has grown to one billion users, spawning dancing trends and ludicrous challenges and generating megaviral music successes like Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” and revivals of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” and Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.”
Facebook is still by far the most popular social network, with about 3 billion users entering in each month and even more when you include Instagram, which is also owned by Facebook parent Meta.
However, under pressure from TikTok’s success, the company that has been connecting people for almost two decades to their college classmates, friends, family, and others with shared interests is attempting to pivot to a new era of social media, where artificial intelligence-driven algorithms are increasingly shaping what users see.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the change as a “significant shift” away from a feed of posts decided by who you follow and toward one filtered by new AI technology he refers to as a “discovery engine.”
Meta’s quarterly results will almost certainly reflect a financial pressure.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is facing existential dangers. Late last year, its major social network lost daily users for the first time in its history. Its audience is becoming older. TikTok has surpassed Instagram in popularity among younger people. Sales growth has slowed, and earnings have fallen.
Meta intends to release its most recent financial report on Wednesday. It’s likely to demonstrate how much competition, as well as global economic difficulties and the looming spectre of Apple’s privacy measures, are pinching the company’s ad revenue.
For years, Zuckerberg has been warning about the growth of TikTok. In a meeting with investors in February, he expressly highlighted the danger it posed, adding :
“people have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly.”
Facebook debuted TikTok-style short movies called Reels two years ago and has been actively pushing them into users’ feeds ever since.
In April, Zuckerberg said that Reels accounted for one-fifth of Instagram time spent. (Many people have pointed out that the reels they see are often replayed TikTok videos.) Now, the firm is going even farther, redesigning the Facebook app to appear and function more like TikTok’s main
For You page, which displays anything the app’s algorithm believes you would enjoy, regardless of who generated it.
Sayman, a software engineer, believes the organisation has no option but to imitate TikTok’s “huge talent display.”, “TikTok comes along and it’s like, ‘Who cares who you follow!'” he said.
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