{"id":1621,"date":"2026-09-07T16:41:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T16:41:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/09\/07\/how-facebooks-news-feed-kicked-off-the-age-of-the-algorithm\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T16:41:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T16:41:01","slug":"how-facebooks-news-feed-kicked-off-the-age-of-the-algorithm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/09\/07\/how-facebooks-news-feed-kicked-off-the-age-of-the-algorithm\/","title":{"rendered":"How Facebook\u2019s News Feed kicked off the age of the algorithm"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/span> Wachiwit\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is two decades since Facebook introduced the News Feed<\/a> \u2013 letting loose a world in which algorithms would shape ever more of our lives.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Facebook<\/a> was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier (as TheFacebook<\/a>), the company had stopped growing. People weren\u2019t joining, and existing users weren\u2019t spending more time on the site.<\/p>\n

The solution co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues came up with, the News Feed, meant individual users\u2019 homepages would be automatically updated with information tailored to them \u2013 in particular, new posts their Facebook friends had added.<\/p>\n

Up to then, users had to actively check their friends\u2019 profiles to see what they were up to. Now, this information would automatically be sent to your homepage. With it, a new world of algorithmic<\/a> interaction was born.<\/p>\n

It might seem quaint now, but for many Facebook users at the time, these changes felt like a violation of their privacy and trust. If you were to change your relationship status from \u201cin a relationship\u201d to \u201cit\u2019s complicated\u201d, for example, this could now be broadcast to all of your online friends.<\/p>\n

The News Feed caused the first major protest against Facebook<\/a>. Tens of thousands of users joined a group calling for the return of the original system. A spontaneous protest emerged outside Facebook\u2019s office in the city of Palo Alto, California. For the first time, the company felt it had to hire security guards.<\/p>\n

Video: Mashable.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Zuckerberg issued a sort-of-apology<\/a>, but he didn\u2019t back down. What he and other Facebook engineers could see was that, rather than pushing people away from the site, the News Feed was driving more engagement \u2013 leading users to spend more and more time on the platform.<\/p>\n

A revolution in media consumption<\/h2>\n

Twenty years later, we can understand this development as one of the most significant socio-technical changes<\/a> of the entire digital revolution. It ushered in an age where algorithmic systems structured how people interacted, consumed news and conducted political activity.<\/p>\n

Crucially, to enable this new \u201ccontent pushing\u201d approach, Facebook engineers had to build a new digital architecture that moved the site away from being a static social network, into an algorithmic system built around the extraction and analysis of user data.<\/p>\n

Under this new system, in the words of researchers Christina Alaiamo and Jannis Kallinikos<\/a>, Facebook users could be \u201ccomputed on the basis of discrete and countable activities\u201d, turning them into \u201cidentifiable, knowable and actionable objects\u201d.<\/p>\n

Facebook had thus shifted from a site primarily enabling social interaction to one concerned with the production and commercialisation of knowledge. With increasing accuracy, it understood what type of content kept users on the site longer \u2013 and what type of information could influence people\u2019s behaviour<\/a> outside and beyond the site.<\/p>\n

Facebook could now continuously optimise the level of social interactions using its algorithmic ranking system, Edge Rank<\/a>. With a tweak, it could switch from prioritising messages from close friends to content that generated greater interaction, or outrage.<\/p>\n

This took power away from users towards the corporation, and raised concerns that users were spending more time on the site than they seemed to want to<\/a>. (Eventually, this would lead to a \u201cmajor overhaul\u201d<\/a> of the News Feed in 2018, with Facebook promising to re-prioritise \u201cmeaningful social interactions\u201d over \u201crelevant content\u201d.)<\/p>\n

But above all, Facebook\u2019s innovation in 2006 enabled it to capture huge amounts of user data that would, over the next two decades, enable it to expand globally at an astonishing rate \u2013 and generate vast amounts of revenue<\/a> in the process.<\/p>\n

Video: CBS New York.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A very different algorithmic age<\/h2>\n

Twenty years on, Facebook\u2019s parent company Meta and other big tech platforms face challenges far more powerful than spontaneous protests on the streets of Palo Alto. Across the world, there is sustained activity from democratic institutions and states to contain the power and perceived harm of the algorithmic systems<\/a> that emerged from 2006.<\/p>\n

In Australia, use of social media platforms by under-16s is banned<\/a>, and this is potentially spreading to the UK<\/a>. Meanwhile, courts in the US<\/a> have forced Meta to restrict the amount of access that children have to their products. While less than 1% of Facebook\u2019s revenue<\/a> comes from teens, the precedents set by these legal cases appear significant.<\/p>\n

However, we also live in a very different algorithmic age than the one heralded by the launch of the News Feed 20 years ago. While Meta continues to derive most of its revenue from its social network platforms, which also include Instagram and WhatsApp, recent investments<\/a> and prospective AI product launches<\/a> suggest its leadership believe future revenue streams will largely be tied to developments in machine learning, large language models and \u201csuperintelligence\u201d.<\/p>\n

The question is: will governments and other institutions react more quickly to the concerns<\/a> raised<\/a> by this new era of AI development than they did to the emergence of algorithms two decades ago? On past evidence, this looks unlikely.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Asher Kessler received funding from the Economic and Social Science Research Council.
\n<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wachiwit\/Shutterstock It is two decades since Facebook introduced the News Feed \u2013 letting loose a world in which algorithms would shape ever more of our lives. In 2006, Facebook was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier (as TheFacebook), the company had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1621\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redzine.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}