This week, Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in an antitrust trial that would outcome within the breakup of Meta’s social networking empire. It is likely to be years earlier than the almost 3 billion customers of the corporate’s flagship app Fb—identified internally because the Blue app—study the destiny of the service they nonetheless use, regardless of the fixed obituaries. (For the document, two years in the past, Tom Alison, who heads the service, issued a press release affirming “Fb will not be lifeless nor dying.”) However with all of the hubbub surrounding the trial, Fb customers might need missed essentially the most important information about Blue in years. On March 27, 2025, the 21-year-old firm quietly introduced a brand new characteristic on its cellular app: an choice that will give customers the novel expertise of seeing their pals’ content material on Fb. Lastly, there was a substitute for a information feed overwhelmed with rubbish, gossip, and influencer movies that folks don’t essentially ask for however can’t resist clicking on after which feeling dangerous about. By finding and deciding on the Mates tab, your feed will populate solely with posts from folks you realize in actual life and that you’ve chosen to attach with. You may even name it a social app. Think about!
The corporate’s clarification is telling. “Through the years, Fb advanced to fulfill altering wants…” learn the press launch, “however the magic of pals has fallen away.” I marvel on the passive voice. Meta’s valuation is over a trillion. It has related almost half of humanity—all due to the ability of individuals wanting to maintain up with family and friends. And someway, the corporate’s core function of connecting pals simply … fell away? Did the hundreds of engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, and managers engaged on Fb simply wake in the future and say, “Hey, has anybody seen the stuff that’s the very cause we’re an organization?”
No, this didn’t simply occur. Think about that, in that 2023 press launch about Fb not being lifeless, Alison listed the priorities for the app that yr, together with “synthetic intelligence, messaging, creators and monetization.” Not a phrase about boosting pal content material, despite the fact that Meta executives knew that folks needed to see simply that. It got here out in court docket that for years Zuckerberg has been conscious that his customers crave listening to extra from their pals. A Meta survey in 2020 discovered that 61 % of customers needed extra pal posts, and 66 % needed to see a wider range of posts amongst their pals. A yr later, one other survey reported that three out of the highest 4 “ache factors” on Fb had been resulting from what the Federal Commerce Fee known as “diminished funding in family and friends sharing.”
Right here’s one clarification for this. Content material from influencers, political activists, and fake information organizations is extra worthwhile and retains folks on the service longer. Misinformation from a stranger is value extra to Meta than household updates and journey photographs from pals. These don’t normally go viral. That’s why, when Alison wrote about AI, he didn’t imply utilizing it to seek out what your pals are saying however to attach you with creators who’re posting to spice up their very own wallets, with the assistance of Fb monetization. On the stand, Zuckerberg provided a distinct clarification for the change: Folks started sharing on messaging apps as a substitute of social platforms. However might or not it’s that the rationale that they stopped sharing on Fb was that every one these poisonous posts from strangers made the platform disagreeable?
Zuckerberg was slippery when it got here to admitting that he purchased Instagram and WhatsApp to get rid of competitors—a key subject within the trial. However he was frank in acknowledging that the mission of the corporate has veered dramatically from the unique feel-good campaign to attach people. It’s now as a lot an leisure firm as a social community, he says. A chart shared by Meta confirmed that leisure had overwhelmed social content material. In 2025, Fb customers spent solely 17 % of their time content material shared from pals. That’s not as a result of they like to learn stuff from influencers and anger-boosters—keep in mind, Meta’s personal surveys present that customers are dying to see stuff from folks they know. But Zuckerberg matter-of-factly famous that with regards to pal content material, “That a part of what we do hasn’t actually grown.” Once more, the passive voice!
Given the starvation folks must see pal posts, one may anticipate that the talents of Meta’s proficient workforce can be employed to maximise the worth of human connections. For a few years, it was. Within the early 2010s, I used to be ceaselessly known as to Mark Zuckerberg’s convention room, dubbed the Aquarium, to see some attention-grabbing venture meant to extend the worth of the social community. A few of these initiatives didn’t work out—keep in mind graph search?—however they had been sincere makes an attempt at fulfilling the corporate mission. As the last decade progressed, the social side of Fb turned much less of a precedence for Zuckerberg, and his ardour shifted to digital actuality and synthetic intelligence.
