Facebook rebrands News Feed to Feed, stirs up online memes
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Meta is changing the name of Facebook's News Feed to "Feed", which is a primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network. The term "News Feed" has been used since the feature was first introduced on the social platform more than 15 years ago.
https://twitter.com/facebookapp/status/1493633545444675589?s=20&t=-TLBMrgm3KCVZk4sbMu66Q
According to The Verge, the rebranding was a result of users thinking there would be news stories in the feed and not necessarily posts by friends. Nonetheless, netizens have not held back, unleashing a series of memes on the Internet in response to the latest rebranding.
https://twitter.com/schlife/status/1493641792717213699
https://twitter.com/hughsheehy/status/1493648845619798027
https://twitter.com/flightlevel1221/status/1493638820994207745
https://twitter.com/tamparker6
https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/1493649078726664195
https://twitter.com/TheJamesMattone/status/1493645787888111616
Meanwhile, some netizens used "Feed" to represent livestock, joking that "this feed was unfit for human consumption". Another netizen tweeted that it must have taken "349 brainstorm meetings" to decide on the name, while another sarcastically said this was a "good move" by the company since it can "pretend" that users did not get news from Facebook.
When asked about the decision for the rebranding, a Meta spokesperson told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that the name change "better reflects the broad nature of content" a user will see while scrolling. The spokesperson added that users would be able to see the change in name from today.
This move comes nearly a year after Meta said it was working on reducing the amount of political content in its News Feed feature. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a previous earnings call that the common feedback it heard was that its users did not want political content to take over the News Feed. Since then, Facebook has taken measures to " better understand peoples’ varied preferences for political content, testing "a number of approaches based on those insights".
Over the years, the Facebook name has taken a beating from the Cambridge Analytica scandal to The Facebook Files. In 2019, Facebook even renamed Instagram and WhatsApp to "Instagram from Facebook" and "WhatsApp from Facebook" to be clearer about the products and services it owns. Facebook, now known as Meta, came under scrutiny last year after its former employee and whistleblower, Frances Haugen, came forward and raised concerns over the platform's ill effects on users. According to her, Meta's products were causing harm to users, such as mental health issues among teenagers, and the tech giant prioritised profit over user safety and well being.
Shortly after that, the tech giant rebranded to Meta, shifting its focus from social to the metaverse. For Zuckerberg, the metaverse was "a major investment", and his goal was to help the "metaverse reach a billion people and hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce". In June last year, Facebook invested US$50 million in a XR Programs and Research fund for a period of two years to collaborate with industry partners, civil rights groups, non-profits and academic institutions to build the metaverse responsibly.
Earlier this month, Meta released its "Personal Boundary" tool to address the concerns circulating around user safety and sexual harassment in the metaverse. With this tool, avatars in the metaverse were prevented from coming within a set distance of each other, creating more personal space for people and making it easier to avoid unwanted interactions.The new tool aims to set behavioural norms, which Meta considers to be important for a relatively new medium such as VR, and will be featured inside its games Horizon Worlds and Horizon Venues.
"This builds upon our existing hand harassment measures that were already in place, where an avatar’s hands would disappear if they encroached upon someone’s personal space," said Meta. Improvements will be made over time after Meta learns how this affects people's experiences.
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