Last January, Facebook made a major announcement.
The social media giant said that, moving forward, it would overhaul its News Feed to shift the type of content users see first, and most often. The reason, according to the company’s official statement: “So people have more opportunities to interact with the people they care about.”
The change came in the earlier part of what would be some of Facebook’s most tumultuous years in its history.
Only a few months prior, the company admitted that it had been weaponized by foreign actors to spread misinformation with hopes of influencing the 2016 U.S. presidential election. And that March, information came forward that personal user information had been improperly harvested and leveraged by voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica.