Meta Has New Branding On Facebook, Rename News Feed To Feed Only

The name of the News Feed on Facebook is just a Feed. (photo: doc. facebook)

JAKARTA - Meta changed the name of News Feed on Facebook to Feed, the main part of the service that users scroll through to see what their friends and family have shared.

According to a tweet the company shared via its @FacebookApp account, going forward it will simply be called Feed. The News Feed nickname has been around since the feature was first introduced more than 15 years ago.

The change, which comes just months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced he was renaming the company to Meta.

Starting today, our News Feed will now be known as "Feed." Happy scrolling! pic.twitter.com/T6rjO9qzFc

— Facebook App (@facebookapp) February 15, 2022

This is another sign Facebook is trying to change perceptions about its core product. Meta says that the name News Feed makes people think it's a place for news rather than posts shared by friends.

In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said the new changes are meant to better reflect the variety of content people see in their Feeds.

Cited from Engadget, Wednesday, February 16, it should be noted, this new name will not change how the features in the app work. However, the removal of "News" from the name will likely be seen as symbolic of Meta's changing priorities, as it looks to a future centered on the metaverse, not its social networking apps.

Facebook's handling of news has long been a thorny issue for the company. Meta executives have argued for years that news is only a small percentage of what people share on the platform, and the company completely reoriented its feed in 2018 to focus on Facebook friends rather than publishers.

Previously, research has shown that misinformation gets significantly more responses on the platform than fact-based reporting, and Meta's regulator in the United States (US) has been looking into how big tech companies are algorithmically ranking content in their feeds.

Now that Meta is reportedly working on reducing the amount of political content that appears on its users' homepages, its own research shows that News Feed algorithms can encourage even politicians to take more extreme positions.