European Meta users will soon have more ways to escape algorithmic recommendations on Facebook and Instagram. In a blog post published on Tuesday August 22Nick Clegg, president responsible for public affairs of the parent company of the two social networks, announced that Internet users in the European Union (EU) will now have the possibility of seeing “Reels” and “stories” – videos or sequences short respectively inspired by TikTok and Snapchat – as well as the results of a search without any algorithmic curation.
“For example, on Facebook and Instagram, users will have an option to see only Stories and Reels posted by people they follow, listed in order [anté]chronological, from the most recent to the oldestexplains Nick Clegg. They will also be able to see search results based only on the words they used, rather than personalized results based on their past activity and interests. »
The objective for Meta: to comply with the European regulation on digital services (Digital Services Act, DSA), adopted in April 2022, the first measures of which come into force on Friday. It requires major platforms to allow their users to opt out of personalized content recommendations. It is also for the same reason that the social network TikTok, at the beginning of August, also announced that it would now be possible for its EU users to choose to view popular videos in a given region rather than an algorithmic selection of content.
“More than 1,000 people are currently working on the DSA” to Meta, assures Nick Clegg, in order to “developing solutions to respond to [ses] requirements ». Meta had, moreover, already implemented changes concerning its personalized recommendations, but these then only concerned news feeds and not Reels and stories: in March 2022, Instagram had thus (re) introduced a feed purely chronological news – which had been the norm on the social network from 2010 to 2016 -, while Facebook, in July of the same year, had created a “publication feed” tab. This allows for example to display only the content, in chronological order, of his “friends” or “pages” followed on the social network.