Some Facebook ex-staffers think Twitter-inspired '13 shift to display more news was a failed experiment, as time spent on FB has been declining for past 2 years
Getty Images / John Paczkowski, BuzzFeed News — When news broke on Thursday evening of Facebook's dramatic overhaul of its News Feed …
Context & Ripple Effects
This report closes a loop that opened in 2013, when Facebook reweighted the News Feed toward news in a bid to mimic Twitter's real-time feel. The intervening years produced a string of reversals: the trending-topics contractor disclosures put Facebook's news curation under scrutiny in 2016, and by October 2017 it was running a six-country test moving non-promoted Page posts out of the main feed entirely.
What BuzzFeed adds is internal testimony that the news-heavy direction never paid off in the metric Facebook cares about most — time spent, which has declined for two straight years. The subsequent quiet end of the Explore Feed test confirms the company was already walking back feed experiments before this overhaul made the retreat official.
First-order effects
- Publishers that built referral traffic strategies on Facebook face shrinking organic reach as the company treats news content as a drag on engagement rather than a growth engine.
- Facebook's own product leadership gets an internal narrative for the pivot: ex-staffers framing 2013's news push as a failed experiment gives cover for de-prioritizing media content in the feed.
Second-order effects
- Media companies must diversify away from a single distribution partner whose algorithm changes can erase audience overnight — pushing them toward owned channels, subscriptions, and other platforms like Twitter.
- Competing platforms gain a recruiting and positioning argument: if Facebook is pulling back from news, Twitter's real-time identity becomes a differentiator for both users and publishers seeking reach.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social platforms will structurally separate personal sharing from professional media — news relegated to secondary feeds, tabs, or removal — ending the era when the News Feed doubled as a primary news-distribution layer.
- Engagement metrics becoming the arbiter of editorial strategy means platform-news relationships will be governed by time-spent economics rather than civic or journalistic value, inviting regulatory attention on how news is ranked and demoted.
The trend: Facebook is unwinding its decade-long bet that news content drives engagement, demoting media in favor of the personal and video content that holds user time.