Even Mark Zuckerberg is admitting that Facebook is bad now© Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images

The realization that Facebook is broken appears to have finally creeped all the way to the top.

Mark Zuckerberg, who created the social network 21 years ago and has retained total control of its Menlo Park parent company Meta, seems to be coming around to the issue that the current Facebook barely resembles the one that took the world by storm. Once known as the internet’s best place to connect with long-lost friends and tie real-world communities, Facebook is now fully in the business of maximizing engagement – with all the clickbaity videos, unsolicited recommendations and AI-generated “slop” that entails.

“We’ve heard you,” a Thursday blog post from the company began. “Facebook Feed doesn’t always serve up fresh, engaging posts that you consistently enjoy. We’re working on it.”

The post went on to explain that Facebook is clamping down on accounts that share “spammy content that clutters people’s Feed,” as well as those faking engagement and impersonating others. The plan builds on an announcement from late March, when Facebook said it created a new Friends tab that has only friends’ posts, and none from recommended accounts. At that time, the company pointed to Groups, Video and Marketplace as successful innovations but admitted: “the magic of friends has fallen away.”

“This is the first of several experiences coming this year that will bring back the joy of what we first created on Facebook,” the company wrote.

Meta’s own statistics show that Facebook has turned away from the purpose of keeping friends in touch. In the hundreds of millions of hours that people scroll on Facebook every month, just 17% of that time is spent looking at posts from friends, Meta revealed earlier in April. The social network’s algorithm instead clutters its Feed with promotional posts, ads, and recommended videos that often bury updates from people that users actually know.

The recent company announcements show that Meta is acting on a comment from Zuckerberg that drew headlines in late January.

In an earnings call, the CEO said that Facebook now has more than 3 billion users a month, while noting that the site could have far more “cultural influence,” and pledged to get “back to some OG Facebook.” Specifics were scarce, but he said new initiatives this year might put the business end on the back burner, and that the changes would “get back to how Facebook was originally used back in the day.”

The new Friends tab and cuts to spam content have been a long time coming, but they likely won’t suddenly fix the platform’s struggles to attract new, young users. It’s unclear how it took the company so long to realize that, as the company said at the end of Thursday’s post: “Social media should feel social.”

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