The company said Tuesday that Meta is implementing customizable and personalized content through Facebook Reels to further cater to your interests. The new features look similar to aspects of TikTok’s dedicated ForYou page.
New customization controls for Reels will allow people to customize the content they want to see and avoid the content they don’t. Meta also said it’s adding Reels to the main navigation of Facebook Watch, which will allow short and long-form video scrolling.
Customization controls come in the form of Show More or Show Less buttons that you can touch by selecting the three-dot menu at the bottom of the video player after watching a video. Meta said this option will also appear organically below reels and videos in your watch feed. The icons serve the interests of viewers, and Meta said in the release, they temporarily inflate or deflate content ranking.
Meta introduced the Show More/Show Less feature through its Facebook Feed in October. The tool relies on artificial intelligence to prioritize and deprioritize content based on a person’s choice.
Reels are becoming more popular, Meta said, with the rate of people re-sharing reels on Facebook doubling over the past six months. Meta is also releasing stickers on Reels videos, which tell the viewer why a particular piece of content appears in their feed.
Reels’ updates seem to be taking notes from the popular short-form video platform, TikTok. The video app has grown in popularity with a highly customizable ForYou page that relies on an algorithm to determine which videos a viewer likes or dislikes.
TikTok’s future in the US is uncertain: Some US lawmakers are pushing to ban the app over alleged national security concerns related to its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. As lawmakers try to figure out the next steps for TikTok, other social media companies are copying some of its popular features.