Social media never rests: On Wednesday, Facebook revealed changes that would give users more control over what they see on their feeds and home pages, and who can comment, while Instagram’s Reels feature took another step to become more like TikTok .
On the main platform of Facebook, users on Android or iOS can sort newsfeed items according to the latest or have the algorithms selected. You can also change the content that is displayed on your home pages by using the “Favorites” setting.
“By selecting up to 30 friends and pages to be favorites, their posts will appear higher in the senior news feed and can also be viewed as a separate filter,” the company explained, adding that the user interface for the Creation of the function should be optimized more accessible.
Better user control over comments is also part of the update. Users have new features that allow only “friends,” “friends of friends,” or the broader “public” to leave messages, similar to the post visibility settings. Twitter introduced similar features so users of the micro-messaging platform may find Facebook’s new feed familiar.
This joins other changes made by Facebook to allow people to close political ads or “sleep off” a specific page or person’s posts.
The updates look like a reaction to the heat turned on the tech giant as it deals with the spread of misinformation. Critics, including those in Congress, accuse the company of not doing enough to curb the amplification of dangerous content – and even say the platform helps radicalize people by showing increasingly harmful content once a given user Expressed interest in certain posts.
To this end, Facebook also inserts “Why am I seeing this?” Click the button to shed more light on why the algorithm shows certain newsfeed posts across friends, pages, and groups. They can be based on previous related posts or topics that the person liked or is on.
Although the company denied its algorithms were a problem, these recent moves look like a rehabilitation attempt – or at least show that they are somehow responding to criticism. Of course, this can also change the calculation of how far harmless pages can reach.
Instagram has managed to escape much of the fire that was directed against his parent company, and that may allow him more freedom to experiment. The last change in the photo and video sharing network was made on Wednesday via the short-form video function Reels.
Reels’ “Remix”.
Image courtesy
The platform introduced “Remix,” a feature similar to TikTok’s “Duets”. Remix allows users to use someone else’s video to create and share their own alongside.
Duets is largely blamed for fueling the ByteDance app boom among consumers, especially Generation Z audiences.
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