The biggest Facebook algorithm change to date: Reasons and consequences

A week has passed since Facebook announced what could be the biggest change to its algorithm to date. The change has been under way for long and is the culmination of a long trend towards lower engagement numbers and click throughs for publishers.

Nonetheless, the change created a lot of buzz — particularly amongst publishers whose content will now generally be deprioritized in favour of content from friends and family and content with high engagement. But why did Facebook change its algorithm? And what will it mean for publishers?

The reasons for Facebook’s big algorithm change

One motivation for the change could be that Facebook has seen a decline in user activity — particularly amongst young people who have fled to platforms such as Snapchat at first then Instagram, which arguably provide a more intimate and social experience.

By favouring more personal content such as posts from friends and family, Facebook is perhaps aiming to revive itself as a platform for interpersonal interactions between users rather than a platform for brands and media to propagate content which mostly evolves around what the companies want to say rather than what the users want to hear.

The change could also, at least in part, be the offspring of Russian trolling during the 2016 US presidential election and subsequent calls for Facebook to prevent the spread of fake news on the platform. So from this perspective, the change could be aimed at removing focus from the debate around which role Facebook ought to play in the issue of the proliferation of fake news on the platform. Rather than taking a moral standpoint in the debate, Facebook now hopes to avoid negative publicity by changing the algorithm and mask it as a way of encouraging more meaningful interactions.

Stories of Russian meddling in the election is not the only publicly debated issue that could harm Facebook. Recently, potential health issues related to the consumption of digital media and smart device usage — particularly amongst young people — has received considerable attention. For instance,Apple investors called for the company to develop tools and research effects on young people of smartphone overuse and addiction. In this light, the recent algorithm change can be seen as a move to mitigate the risk of becoming the subject of another large scale public debate which could potentially cause users to withdraw from the social network on a large scale, hurting time spent on the platform more than anything else.

The consequences of Facebook’s big algorithm change

EDIT: Facebook's Head of News Feed has announced that "trustworthy" publishers will be prioritized. Thus, they might see an increase in engagement.

Publishers will continue to use Facebook, but they will use it as means to build long lasting relationships with their readers, rather than as a means to get short term page views referred from Facebook. The aim of this will be to have readers visit the website directly without Facebook as an intermediary. Whether publishers will succeed in this is of course questionable, particularly considering that most news consumption has been found to be incidental. Consequently of strategies aimed at building and enhancing relationships with readers, we may expect less low quality journalism and less click-bait. The change may also cause publishers to diversy by strenghtening focus on other existing distribution channels and adding new ones.

Extending the trend towards building stronger relationships with readers, the move towards a more scattered media landscape with more niche-focused, differentiated media outlets may be sped up. This trend could manifest itself as either an increase in independent niche media or as big media corporations doing more to build separate readerships for their various news sections. We’ve already seen Major League Baseball announce a niche app where MLB players can connect to fans, and prominent journalists leaving big media corporations to do more niche focused journalism. The following chain of arguments will lay out why this may be an indirect consequence of the algorithm change:

There’s a very tiny probability that your content will make it into the newsfeed of your friends or followers (it once was 0.02 percent and now it is probably even lower), so you want to increase the probability that each of your followers will interact with your content because this will increase the probability of the content propagating into the news feed of the friends of your followers. You can increase this probability by fostering communitythrough focusing on a niche part of a news category. For instance, instead of focusing on business news in general, focus on business news from the tech industry. If all your followers are interested in tech business news, there should be a higher probability that they interact with your content, and you avoid having people who are not interested in tech news see your posts about tech news.

Facebook’s algorithm does of course try to make sure that only relevant content is put in the news feed of your followers, but you could arguably make its job easier by focusing on niche audiences. Publishers making Facebook groups for specific interests could be the beginning of this trend towards a more differentiated media landscape.

Will the algorithm change last? Well, one argument could be that it won’t last because Facebook users do actually want to receive news through Facebook. This notion is backed by the fact that a majority of people in both the US and in European countries use social media as a news source, and upwards one fifth of Americans reporting that they use social media as a news source “often”. Even though Facebook does expect time spent on Facebook to go down as a result of the algorithm change, the decrease might be larger than anticipated if news consumption proves to be a large driver of time spent on the platform and media do not succeed in telling people to click “see first” on their Facebook page.

One could also perceive the change to be the beginning of the end of Facebook’s dominance in the western social media landscape. Though Facebook popularity has been decreasing for some time with a decline in active users and teen preference towards other platforms, the algorithm change could be the event to speed up that process. If Facebook loses its stance as a major news source for people and a way for people to stay connected to their favorite brands, and the company fails to stop the flight from the platform of younger generations, user numbers could begin to decline rapidly.

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