The Facebook news feed is missing a syllable.
what you need to know
- Meta has renamed the Facebook News Feed to “Feed”.
- The name change follows a recent rebrand of the company and its products.
- The new “Feed” should be functionally the same as before.
Meta has announced via Twitter that it is renaming “News Feed” for the first time since the platform was introduced in 2006. From now on, it will simply be called “Feed”.
It marks the latest rebranding after the big company last year changed its name from “Facebook” to “Meta”, which earlier this year expanded into the company’s VR headsets like the Quest 2, dropping the famous “Oculus” branding for “Meta.” That said, this rebranding wasn’t that drastic.
Starting today, our news feeds will now be called “feeds”. Happy scrolling! pic.twitter.com/T6rjO9qzFc
— Facebook app (@facebookapp) February 15, 2022
The change in the following controversies surrounding misinformation is an odd one for the company, not to mention Meta’s efforts to improve its own moderation of news posts that appear on the Feed.
That said, the Facebook app has a dedicated “News” tab separate from the regular feed, so the move is also likely to avoid any confusion between the two feeds.
We reached out to Meta to learn more about the decision to rename the feed. The company did not immediately respond, but a spokesperson told The Verge that the change was made to “better reflect the diverse content people see on their feeds” and “will not be more broadly Affect the app experience”.
Meanwhile, Meta has been making more drastic changes to the Instagram feed, testing ways for people to adjust the feed based on what they want to see. This includes going back to chronologically provided information where the company retired many years ago. The changes follow Instagram’s recent controversy over its impact on teens’ mental health.
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