Instagram, Facebook to show more posts from accounts you don’t follow - The Verge
In its push to compete with TikTok, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will more than double the amount of content from recommended accounts in Instagram and Facebook.
If you already have strong feelings about your Instagram feed increasingly showing Reels from accounts you don’t follow, just wait until next year.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will more than double the amount of content from recommended accounts people see while using Instagram and Facebook by the end of 2023. He said that such recommendations currently account for roughly 15 percent of the content on Facebook, and that the percentage is already higher on Instagram.
The push, which Zuckerberg calls building the “Discovery Engine,” is a radical departure from Facebook and Instagram’s historical focus on showing posts from a user’s social graph, or list of friends. The shift is intended to compete with TikTok’s heavy use of AI to serve up videos regardless of where they come from. That approach has quickly made TikTok one of the most used apps in the world and spawned a whole new creator economy.
During Meta’s second quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg explained that as “Al finds additional content that people find interesting, that increases engagement and the quality of our feeds.” He said Meta will use AI to recommend all the content people publicly share on its service, such as links or photos.
“In that sense, I think what we’re doing is going to be pretty unique,” he said, alluding to TikTok’s singular focus on short videos. “I don’t think people are going to want to be constrained to one format.”
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