Meta to double the dose of force-fed filler on Instagram, Facebook in 2023

Hundreds of thousands of people have signed a Change.org petition asking the social media site to stop recommending so many accounts they don't follow. Meta confirmed that these users aren't just imagining that there's a sudden wave of reels ruining their online social lives. The short videos make up about 15 percent of the user feeds on both platforms, and soon, even more often, they'll be pushing all the updates from friends that users choose to follow.

Meta revealed on an earnings call that it will more than double the number of recommended Reels that users see. About a third of Facebook andInstagram feeds will be recommended in the years to come, according to the company.

One of the main changes in our business right now is that social feeds are going from being primarily driven by the people and accounts you follow to increasingly also being driven by artificial intelligence recommendations that you'll find interesting from across Facebook orInstagram, even if you don't follow those creators,

The company has a plan to increase user engagement with Reels. On the call, which was her last as COO, she said that Reels is part of Meta's efforts to innovate "relentlessly" to deliver "tools and products that help advertisers drive business results."

It seems like a new opportunity for advertisers.

The Wild Alaskan Company, a sustainable seafood delivery business, tested Reels during an ad campaign that helped it lower its subscriber cost and increase returns on its ad spending. Not every advertiser is finding Reels easy to use, but overall, Meta says that Reels is growing faster than Stories did, with projections indicating that Reels is on track to generate $1 billion in annual revenue.

Reels and the discovery engine are key parts of Meta's strategy to generate enough ad revenue to get through financial setbacks. He stated that user engagement was increasing. He said that Reels has improved the quality of user feeds by using sophisticated artificial intelligence that has been trained to recommend more content that users find interesting, sharing often with friends and sparking new social engagements.

Lots of users don't like Reels. People on petitions complain that they just want to see cute photos of friends and family and not much else.

Tati Bruening, creator of the Change.org petition which is still up despite Meta sharing its plans to continue copying TikTok, said, "Stop trying to be TIKTOK!" A goal of 500,000 signatures has been set for the petition. The only reels uploaded are recycled TikToks that the world has already seen. What is new about old content? There was nothing.