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Fiji Simo, responsible for the Facebook application, speaks at the F8 in San Jose California.
(Facebook)
Facebook Inc. has made a substantial overhaul of its website and mobile app, while Managing Director Mark Zuckerberg seeks to respond to critics of the social media giant's influence by encouraging users to choose different types commitment and more private communication tools.
The end result is a platform with more focus on private groups and visual stories, and less on the news, where abusive content and polarization have taken root in recent years.
One of the victims of the changes: the iconic blue banner of Facebook that has appeared on the screens since the beginning of the 2004 social network.
In an interview, Zuckerberg said the changes unveiled Tuesday was the biggest change to Facebook's main platform in five years and was part of a larger effort to provide less public means of communication. . "Groups are at the heart of the application, not just friends," he said.
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On Tuesday at the Facebook F8 annual Facebook developer conference, he acknowledged his skepticism about his ability to tackle the privacy issues that have been a concern for the company for years.
"I understand that many people are not sure we are serious about this," Zuckerberg said. "I'm sure we'll continue to dig up old questions for a while, so we may not feel like we're making progress in the beginning."
Facebook's new mobile application went online on Tuesday, while users will see the website updated in a few weeks.
Zuckerberg said the changes were part of Facebook's overhaul of its product design, its priorities and even the values it had touted over the past two months. In early March, he said the company would focus on more private communications, encompassing encrypted and ephemeral messaging in its products and guiding its Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram platforms to similar feature sets.
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Facebook is growing groups and is increasingly relying on users to help police services and prevent harassment. Group administrators, not Facebook, are already frontline moderators of behavior in their often closed forums. The company is also adding new resources, including a tool reporting violations of Facebook standards to group moderators, said Fiji Simo, recently appointed Facebook application manager.
Expanding the role of users in policing behavior on Facebook could ease the company, which has spent billions of dollars in recent years to hire moderators and set up artificial intelligence systems to detect abusive content.
Click here to read more about The Wall Street Journal, where this story was first published.
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