Facebook has around 2.9 billion users. All of them are important and confusion is drastic for the reputation of Facebook. Recently, Facebook has faced many challenges of decreasing company value and potentially low number of users per day. This is a haunting nightmare for Mark Zuckerberg and his lofty ideas of Metaverse.
However, the change has come to rename yet another antiquity of Facebook’s parent company Meta. On Tuesday, it rebranded the name of the News Feed to Feed only. The primary purpose to do was to decrease and outrightly eliminate the confusion regarding the News Feed.
The feature was first introduced in September 2006 and ever since, despite many other changes in Facebook, it remained unchanged until now. Feed is the dominant feature of Facebook through which users watch, like, comment, and forward the posts from friends. Even the posts from the groups and pages are visible in the Feed section of Facebook. Facebook’s Twitter page recently tweeted that “Starting today, our News Feed will now be known as “Feed.” Happy scrolling!”
Even though this change applies to the extent of the name only, it has far-reaching consequences. According to the Facebook spokesperson Dami Oyefeso, the News Feed name was misguiding the users that it is specific for the news. As users see different stories and various news, that’s why it was confusing for the users.
Changing the name of News Feed to the Feed can remove that misunderstanding and increase the immersive and seamless experience for the users. Besides depicting the diverse community and vagaries of information, the change which comes now has some more meaning. Let’s discover why Facebook changed the News Feed name to Feed only after 15 years.
Facebook’s News Feed and misinformation
Regulators held Facebook as a responsible factor for the insurrections at the Capitol in the United States and converting the convoy of the trucks into an organized movement in Canada. It is highlighting and emboldening the role of Facebook in riots, chaos, and worldwide extremist mass demonstrations.
However, it doesn’t stop here, and the antitrust lawsuits and data protection and privacy laws take this discussion into another realm of turbulence. The U.S. Federal government charged Facebook with data breaches and many other antitrust lawsuits. Even the Meta Newsroom mentioned that misinformation gets more coverage than fact-based news stories.
So, the potential use of the News Feed for disseminating politically motivated news and extreme views against particular groups of society dragged Facebook into another mess. The regulators are now conscious of every move of Facebook. Moreover, recently the dream of cryptocurrency under the supervision of Mark Zuckerberg failed drastically.
Thus, the change in name of News Feed to Feed is not only indicating that Facebook is finding a safe place to play. It also shows that Meta wants to create more legitimacy through data protection, scrutiny of news, and giving more coverage to fact-based news.
Rectifying a misconception
The real motivation behind such a change after 15 years shows many things. Beyond rebranding Facebook as a secure and trustworthy platform, the Feed name also suggests that it is altogether a new feature.
Previously, the News Feed name was misguiding the users that it is specific for the news stories. However, removing the News from the News Feed will help the users to get it accurately that they will encounter a vast range of content, including the news, posts from friends and groups. We can only hope that Facebook can regain the same trust it enjoyed for over a decade.
Wrap up
Facebook rebranded the name of News Feed to Feed only after about 15 years. The News Feed feature was first introduced in 2006 and ever since it was unchanged. However, the recent surge in antitrust lawsuits, data breach cases, and the insecure privacy of Facebook instigated the popular outrage of the U.S judiciary and the regulators.
The chaos for Mark Zuckerberg was intractable and he endeavored to rehabilitate the trust by expanding its empire. First, it tried to rename Facebook to Meta and now Meta has changed the News Feed name to Feed only.
This is a tremendous change and might help to mitigate some of the tensions Meta is confronting right now. But this is not enough to revive the lost stature of Facebook.
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