Recently, Facebook employees were given a new directive with important implications: to make the app feed more like TikTok.
Just bringing Reels, the company’s short-form video feature, from Instagram to Facebook wasn’t going to cut it. Executives were closely following TikTok’s moves and had worried they weren’t doing enough to compete. In talks with CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, they decided that Facebook should completely rethink its feed.
In an internal note from the end of April obtained by The Verge, the executive of Meta in charge of Facebook, Tom Alison, explained the plan: instead of prioritizing the posts of the accounts that people follow, the main channel of Facebook , like TikTok, will start recommending posts no matter what. where they come from. And years after Messenger and Facebook split as separate apps, the two will come back together, mimicking TikTok’s messaging functionality.
Combined with a growing emphasis on Reels, the planned changes show how strongly Meta is responding to the rise of TikTok, which has quickly become a legitimate challenge to its dominance on social media. While Instagram has already been transformed to look more like TikTok with its focus on Reels, executives hope that a similar treatment to Facebook will reverse the stagnant growth of the app and potentially attract young people.
The timing is similar to when Facebook copied Snapchat, as it was growing rapidly, but this time, the stakes are certainly higher. Investors doubt Meta’s ability to meet the challenges of its ad business. And with the stock price already battered, the company needs to show that it can grow if Zuckerberg wants to continue funding its metavers vision.
Alison told employees bluntly in a comment below her April note that I saw: “The risk for us is that we discard this because it’s not valuable to people as a form of communication and social connection and not we can evolve. “
After asking Meta for a comment on her note, the company arranged me with Alison for her first interview since she took over as head of the world’s largest social network last year. He says Facebook’s new goal is to build the “discovery engine,” a phrase also mentioned as a top priority by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during Meta’s most recent earnings call with investors.
“I think what we probably didn’t accept or see at all is how social this format could be.”
During our two recent conversations, Alison acknowledges that the company was slow to see TikTok’s competitive threat, although it initially grew by covering Facebook and Instagram with ads. But now, Meta sees the video app increasingly invading its social media territory, with Alison pointing to the growing prominence of private messaging on TikTok and the introduction of a dedicated tab for watching videos from friends.
“I think what we probably didn’t accept or see is how social this format could be,” he says.
This is how the future Facebook app will work in practice: the main tab will become a mix of stories and reels at the top, followed by posts that your discovery engine recommends on both Facebook and Instagram. It will be a more visual and video-laden experience with clearer directions for sending messages to friends in a post. To make messaging even more prominent, Facebook is working to place a user’s Messenger inbox at the top right of the app, undoing the infamous decision to separate the two apps eight years ago .
Instagram is already far ahead of Facebook in its drive to show more rolls of accounts that you don’t follow or what the company calls “offline” sources. Right now, only 11 percent of Facebook’s main channel content is offline, the company tells me, and so far, these posts have come mostly through exchanges that people post on their network, not on the web. ‘AI of the company.
From my conversations with Alison and her note, it is clear that Meta realizes that in order to truly compete with TikTok, she must replicate the magical experience of TikTok’s “For You” homepage. The news channel, which dropped the “News” of its name earlier this year, pioneered a social channel that learns from the explicit directions you give it, such as making friends or following a page. TikTok took it one step further by guessing what you like about your passive viewing habits by injecting an endless stream of firefighters into short videos on people’s screens. By eliminating the need to track accounts before watching interesting videos, TikTok also leveled the playing field for creators, giving them a way to go viral overnight without much follow-up.
The proof is in the numbers: TikTok, owned by Chinese private technology conglomerate ByteDance, has downloaded a whopping 3.6 billion times, according to mobile app research firm Sensor Tower. According to his estimates, last year, TikTok downloads were 20 percent higher than Facebook and 21 percent higher than Instagram. And during the first three months of this year, iPhone users, on average, spent 78 percent more time on TikTok than on Facebook.
Meanwhile, Facebook still prints billions of dollars a quarter and has 2.94 billion monthly users. But there are indications that his best days are in the rearview mirror. The social network lost users for the first time late last year (Meta does not reveal regular Instagram user numbers). The leaked internal documents also show that Facebook’s user base is constantly aging, and employees don’t know how to correct the trend.
The last major review of Facebook’s feed experience was in 2018 when Zuckerberg said the social network would prioritize “meaningful social interactions” between friends and family. In its quest for engagement, Facebook had been filled with brands trying to gamify its algorithm. According to Zuckerberg, the change was to get Facebook back to its roots.
Tom Alison took over as head of the Facebook app last July. Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge (Photo courtesy of Meta)
Ultimately, the news channel ended up not being the way people wanted to talk to each other, no matter how much Facebook changed it. “Stories are really the way most people share with their friends,” says Alison, referring to the ephemeral format that Facebook and Instagram called Snapchat. He sees that a combination of stories and private messaging linked to Reels is the main way to live the original use case of Facebook: friends and family who keep in touch with each other.
“What we’re really finding is that people want to connect through content,” he says. “So many of the places we go with Facebook are trying to give you the best content that really suits your interests, but then it’s very easy to share it and discuss and connect with other people on your network. That’s it.” Alison has commissioned her product teams to encourage users to send messages to each other about the reels they see on Facebook instead of letting posts lead to conversations in other apps.
Aside from adding more messaging features, Alison is clear that she wants Facebook to be a “cleaner, easier-to-use experience.” When I ask him if the Facebook app has been inflated over the years with all its tabs and notifications, he laughs nervously. “I will say that the Facebook app has a lot to do.”
Since he posted his internal manifesto on the future of Facebook, some employees have expressed concern that the company is being too aggressive copying TikTok. How does it fit to be a site for random videos delivered by AI with the original Facebook mission of baby photos and holiday updates?
“I think there is a real risk in this approach that we will lose focus on our basic differentiation (social graph and human choice) in favor of pursuing short-term interests and trends,” a Facebook employee wrote in a internal response to Alison’s note I saw. In another comment, a product manager was concerned about what happens when TikTok “takes advantage of the metrics of time spent a bit, but over time users realize that it’s not high-quality time spent.” could “harm long-term growth.”
“We won’t really put too many restrictions on when and where we show recommended content in the feed”
Both in her written rebuttals to the employees I saw and in our conversations, Alison insists that the idea of the discovery engine is not the radical pivot of Facebook it seems. “We will always prioritize the things you want to share with your friends,” he says. “I think the most important thing that will change is that we don’t really put too many limitations on when and where we show recommended content on Feed, which we frankly have in the past.”
It remains to be seen whether this new push will ultimately make Facebook a passive experience or not. Bands are a big part of Facebook, and Alison says that doesn’t change, though of course Reels will also show up. Your computers are working on a redesign that moves Groups, or what employees internally call Communities, to a dashboard accessible to the left of the feed, similar to how Discord shows your list of joined servers.
To some current and former employees, this new direction seems to take Facebook away from its main purpose of connecting friends and family. But people are already using the social network differently than before. Zuckerberg said in Meta’s latest earnings call that half the time people spend on Facebook is watching videos. In her note, Alison writes that people “often open our app without explicit intent,” but that “if run well, investing in our discovery engine will improve people’s ability to connect.”
Given the intense scrutiny of how …