Facebook Bets Its Users Really Want a TikTok Clone

Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement on July 21 that was confusing and somewhat misleading. In a Facebook post, he said he was breaking the social network’s feed into two sections. Because users care so much about content from their friends and families, Zuckerberg said, those posts would get their own tab. But when users open the app, they won’t see that tab but the one featuring Facebook’s “discovery engine,” which features content chosen by Meta’s algorithms.

It didn’t take much reading between the lines to see what Facebook was doing: copying TikTok, the video-sharing app that it increasingly sees as its main competitor. The friends-and-family stuff that Facebook has built its empire on is going to become less accessible as Meta experiments with showing users content from people they aren’t following. In theory, doing this could allow Facebook to refine its own version of TikTok’s famously effective algorithms for choosing content, helping it retain users. Meta’s Instagram is also redesigning its app so videos take over the full screen, like they do on TikTok.