Sources: Facebook is working on Collections, a feature to showcase lists of curated content from publishers directly in the News Feed
Alex Heath / Business Insider :
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands early in a long arc of Facebook building its own curation layer on top of the News Feed. The feature described here — curated lists of publisher content surfaced directly in Feed — was later extended when Facebook made Collections shareable so users could pass along gift ideas and shopping lists, and echoed in Stories Highlights, which imported Instagram's collection format for archived photos and videos.
First-order effects
- Publishers gain a new, Facebook-controlled surface inside the News Feed where their content appears pre-packaged into themed lists rather than as individual link posts.
Second-order effects
- The same curation instinct resurfaces two years later when Facebook hires journalists to run a Top News section in its dedicated news tab — each new curated surface shifts distribution leverage further from publishers' own properties toward Facebook's packaging.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds through the newsletter tools Facebook later built for writers and their email lists, the platform consolidates the full pipeline — discovery, curation, audience-building, and monetization — leaving publishers as suppliers inside Facebook's interface.
The trend: Facebook has been steadily internalizing editorial curation — from Feed collections to staff-curated news sections to creator tools — turning aggregation from an algorithmic side effect into a product line.