He says the new goal for Facebook is to build the “discovery engine,” a phrase also mentioned as a top priority by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during Meta’s most recent earnings call with investors. And with its stock price already battered, the company needs to show that it can grow if Zuckerberg wants to keep funding his metaverse vision.Īlison put it bluntly to employees in a comment underneath his April memo I saw: “The risk for us is that we dismiss this as being not valuable to people as a form of social communication and connection and we fail to evolve.”Īfter I asked Meta for comment on his memo, the company set me up with Alison for his first interview since taking the helm of the world’s largest social network last year.

Investors are doubting Meta’s ability to navigate challenges to its ads business. The moment is similar to when Facebook copied Snapchat as it was growing quickly, but this time, the stakes are arguably higher. While Instagram has already morphed to look more like TikTok with its focus on Reels, executives hope that a similar treatment to Facebook will reverse the app’s stagnant growth and potentially lure back young people. And years after Messenger and Facebook split up as separate apps, the two will be brought back together, mimicking TikTok’s messaging functionality.Ĭombined with an increasing emphasis on Reels, the planned changes show how forcibly Meta is responding to the rise of TikTok, which has quickly become a legitimate challenger to its dominance in social media. In an internal memo from late April obtained by The Verge, the Meta executive in charge of Facebook, Tom Alison, spelled out the plan: rather than prioritize posts from accounts people follow, Facebook’s main feed will, like TikTok, start heavily recommending posts regardless of where they come from. In conversations with CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year, they decided that Facebook needed to rethink the feed entirely. Executives were closely tracking TikTok’s moves and had grown worried that they weren’t doing enough to compete.

Simply bringing Reels, the company’s short-form video feature, from Instagram into Facebook wasn’t going to cut it. Facebook employees were recently given a new directive with sweeping implications: make the app’s feed more like TikTok.

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