Facebook on Thursday began to change the manner its filters render posts and videos on its centrepiece News Feed, placing emphasis on conversations among family and friends while making posts from businesses, brands and media less prominent.
Chief Executive of the world's largest social network Mark Zuckerberg, on his page said, organisations may see the popularity of their posts decline in the planned changes that will take effect over the coming weeks.
"We've gotten feedback from our community that public content posts from businesses, brands and media, is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other," Mr Zuckeberg said.
"I'm changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions," he added.
If the public content is to be promoted, it will now have to be seen to encourage community interaction, as it happens within the tight-knit groups that discuss TV programmes and sports.
The shift was likely to mean that the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement would go down in the short term, he wrote, but he added it would be better for users and for the business over the long term.
Advertising on the social network would not be affected by the changes, John Hegeman, a Facebook vice president said in an interview.
Facebook has been criticized for algorithms that may have prioritized misleading news and misinformation in people’s feeds, influencing the 2016 American presidential election, as well as political discourse in many countries.
Last year, the company disclosed that Russian agents had used the network to spread inflammatory posts to polarize the American electorate.
Zuckerberg said an overhaul of the company’s products, beginning with changes to the algorithms that control the News Feed, would help to address those concerns. Similar changes will be made to other products in the coming months, he added.
In many ways this is Facebook getting back to its roots, making users news feed more about what their friends are creating and thinking, rather than articles they have shared.
Faced with the enormous task of having to do more to moderate what's happening on his network, Mr Zuckerberg may have come to the conclusion that having a news free-for-all is becoming more trouble than it's worth.
For news organisations and publications, this might spell bad news, a lot of traffic comes from Facebook. With less prominence, expect some viral sites to very quickly go out of business.
