By copying TikTok, is Facebook making social media disappear?

Say no more “social network”, but “discovery engine”. Overtaken by TikTok, especially among younger people, Facebook now defines its new home page this way. The platform that, by itself, popularized the concept of social network, changes its operation, through a new version of its application.

From now on, users will be faced with posts that are suggested, sponsored or selected by their algorithms. The vast majority of your family’s posts will be relegated to a secondary window. The same goes for Instagram, a subsidiary of Meta (parent company of the two platforms), which now only shows your friends’ posts on rare occasions.

As Mark Zuckerberg said on July 27, the proportion of suggested content shown will at least double by the end of 2023. They currently account for 15% of posts on Facebook and more on Instagram (number not specified).

Goodbye friends, goodbye photos

If the head of Facebook puts so much emphasis on engagement (the time spent on the app), it’s because its Chinese rival TikTok is now doing much better than him: among young people, US users spend three times as much time there than on Instagram. Double, in France. His pitch to investors is mainly intended to reassure markets, which have halved the value of the company since the beginning of the year.

This development is accompanied, again on Facebook and Instagram, by another change: the highlighting of the video format, at the expense of the photo. Always with the aim of capturing the attention of young users, the company is committed to displaying content in full screen, in vertical format, incompatible with most of the shots we are used to doing.

Here again, this choice, modeled on the workings of TikTok, is made to privilege the content and not its streamer, where Instagram and Facebook were originally intended to help Internet users follow their friends or the personalities they love. This decision, which amputates Facebook and Instagram from their social component, has been criticized by many Instagram users, starting with Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, the two most followed women on the platform.

Zuckerberg vs. Zuckerberg

But perhaps the most critical of this policy now chosen by Mark Zuckerberg is… Mark Zuckerberg. At least, the Mark Zuckerberg of 2018. Although the company was then in the spotlight for its management of disinformation and the confinement of users in filter bubbles, the then head of Facebook wanted to return to focus on the essentials, promising that users would see more content. of his friends

In the same message, he acknowledged that keeping Facebook as a social network in the first place might not be optimal, from a purely financial point of view.

A promise that does not seem to have resisted the explosion of the most efficient TikTok model, entirely based on content recommendation, and the pressure of the financial markets.