This is the year for “meaningful social interactions” according to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO.  Last week he announced that his goal for the year is to make sure that the time spent on Facebook is “time well spent”, stating that the Newsfeed algorithm is going to be tweaked to ensure that “public content” (the content shared by businesses and media outlets) would be de-prioritised in favour of content produced by family and friends.

This move is seen as a reaction to the increasing criticism that the social media platform has been facing regarding its addictive nature and the harmful psychological effects of increased social media usage on society.  Facebook maintains that active and “meaningful” interaction on Facebook is good for people and blames the “passive consumption” of social media for being where the problem lies. Their solution is insuring that the personal posts of friends will be seen rather than a viral video produced by a business.  He said that public content has started to “crowd out” the content of family and friends and that his mission now is to bring “the world closer together”.

Although Zuckerberg is sure that this move will mean that the public will spend less time than the average of 50 minutes per day on social media, and that this will in turn have a negative impact on the bottom line of the company, he stated that he wanted to “do the right thing”.

This will obviously have a huge effect on business and media outlets who have had to adapt to a new way of doing business by embracing social media.  It will be interesting to see whether they will find ways of circumventing this change.