In a recent earnings call, Zuckerberg said "the company's apps would shift from being driven 'primarily by people and accounts you follow,' to increasingly also being driven by content recommended by AI".
The reason for the change? Money. Meta recently experienced its first-ever revenue decline, losing 1% in revenue and 36% in profit year-over-year. This so-called "discovery engine" could help brands get in front of new customers, the thing its competitors' algorithms do so well, but it also boxes out accounts you already follow. This is bad for people and possibly good for brands, whose popular content could potentially reach new audiences.
People are upset with Instagram's most recent changes. The platform's chasing TikTok-like features and people are getting annoyed. Photographer Tati Bruening went viral recently with a post asking the platform to "Make Instagram Instagram Again." The post has over 2M likes and shares from celebs like Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner.
This isn't a surprise to most, but videos posted to Instagram that are less than fifteen minutes in length will now be published as Reels. IG is also introducing a new BeReal-like feature that lets users simultaneously record content and their reaction. The "Dual" feature allows users to record using a phone's front and back cameras at the same time. With this change, brands should be optimizing video for Reels, shooting content vertically whenever it makes sense.
Police served Facebook with a search warrant asking to see 17-year-old Celeste Burgess and her mom Jessica's accounts. After Celeste miscarried in April at 23 weeks the two were charged with allegedly removing, concealing, or abandoning a dead human body and concealing the death of another person. They later found Facebook messages between the mother and daughter detailing how Celeste had undergone a self-managed abortion with her mother's help. Meta remains silent on how it will moderate abortion-related content, but users are starting to take notice. As a reaction to this story coming to light hashtag #deletefacebook was briefly trending on Twitter this past week. After the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, many questioned internet privacy and whether it could be used against a woman.
It seems like Facebook may not have followed through with pledges to rid its platform of hate speech and white supremacist groups. The social platform served ads on searches related to these groups after insisting the company doesn't profit from hate speech. Facebook has since said they've fixed an issue where ads were appearing in searches for terms related to banned organizations and are also working to fix an auto-generation problem that caused the ad placement.