Facebook rebrands News Feed after more than 15 years

Meta is renaming Facebook's News Feed, the primary part of the service that users scroll through to see what their friends and family have shared. Going forward, it will simply be called "feed," according to a tweet from the company on Tuesday. The name "news feed" has been in place since the feature was first introduced 15 years ago.

In some ways, this is a big change – Facebook is one of the most used platforms in the world, and Feed is its main interface. On the other hand, according to an email sent to The Verge by Facebook spokesperson Demi Ofeso, "this is just a name change to better reflect the variety of content people see on their feed." The change "does not affect the app experience more broadly."

However, there is much more to the name, and the rebranding reflects Facebook's poor relationship with delivering news. Research has shown that misinformation gets significantly more engagement on the platform than fact-based reporting, and regulators are paying close attention to how big tech companies algorithmically rank content in their feeds. For its part, Meta has said it is working on reducing the amount of political content that appears on people's homepages – with its own research suggesting that the News Feed's algorithms also allow politicians in more extreme positions. may inspire you to move.

Information about politics and current events, rather than posts from your cousin about their engagement, are things you'd expect to find in something called a "news feed." Personally, it makes it hard not to read the name change as a subtle reframing of how seriously I should be taking the stuff the algorithm is serving.

The name change can also help clear up potential confusion within the app. A decade and a half ago, when the News Feed was introduced, Facebook didn't even have a News tab for users to mix it up with. In a memo to employees, Meta said that the name "News Feed" made people think it was a place for news rather than posts from friends.