Facebook says that it is putting to an end an experiment in six countries that placed publisher content in a different feed. For a while now, Facebook has been placing posts from official pages in a different feed called Explore all the while constraining the actual News Feed to posts from friends and family in six different countries. The experiment which has since October started did not achieve the result for which it was carried out and so the company put it to a stop.
Adam Mosseri, who runs the News Feed said in a blog post that, “People don’t want two separate feeds. In surveys, people told us they were less satisfied with the posts they were seeing, and having two separate feeds didn’t actually help them connect more with friends and family.”
Facebook has made some changes to the News Feed this year in a bid to make more “meaningful interactions” between friends and family. In addition to that, the company has reduced to the barest minimum the number of news articles in the News Feed by up to 20 percent.
However, the Explore Feed experiment which was designed to promote those interactions had a lot of outcomes which were not deliberate. According to the report reaching us from our sources, last month, the feed promoted the spread of fake news by keeping journalists and authorities from placing stories that exposed fraudulences into the News Feed.
There is a huge probability that publishers will breathe a sigh of relief over this information. Though the number of traffic that publishers receive from Facebook has shown a sudden sharp decrease for more than a year, news outlets in those six countries where Facebook experimented on the Explore feed showed drops of an additional 30 percent.
