Facebook Gets a New Look

From The Wall Street Journal:

Facebook Inc. rolled out a substantial redesign of its website and mobile app, geared partly toward steering users to participate in more group conversations as the company strives to reduce abusive content and the scrutiny resulting from it.

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Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview that the changes unveiled Tuesday mark the most significant alteration to Facebook’s core platform in years and are part of a larger effort to offer less-public ways of communicating. The company also made its video- and photo-heavy feature Stories more prominent in the redesign, building on the popularity of similar features in its sister app, Instagram.

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In addition to the removal of the blue banner and a generally lighter color scheme, hundreds of smaller details have been altered to reflect “that groups are at the heart of the app, not just friends,” he said.

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Mr. Zuckerberg positioned the latest redesign as part of a broad rethinking of Facebook’s product design, priorities and even values that he has touted publicly over the last two months. In early March, he said the company would focus on more private communications, embracing encrypted and ephemeral messaging across its products and guiding its Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram platforms toward similar sets of features.

Weeks later, Mr. Zuckerberg began championing a global approach to internet regulation, declaring decisions about content on Facebook’s platforms too important to leave to the company.

Facebook is cultivating Groups as it shifts toward relying more on users to help police content and prevent harassment. Group administrators, not Facebook, are already front-line moderators of behavior within their often closed forums. The company is adding new resources, including a tool that flags violations of Facebook standards within the group for moderators, said Fidji Simo, the recently appointed head of the Facebook App.

Expanding the role of users in policing behavior on Facebook could relieve some pressure on the company to do so—after it has spent billions of dollars in recent years to hire contract moderators and build artificial-intelligence systems to screen for abusive content.

One risk of encouraging like-minded users to connect and discuss shared passions in groups is the potential for forums that share misinformation to blossom further. Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook would discourage users from gravitating toward such groups by making them less prominent. “If people really seek it out on their own, fine,” he said of existing Facebook groups that promote conspiracy theories. “But part of our responsibility is to make sure we don’t recommend groups that share misinformation.”

There may be more to work out. A search for “cancer” in the Groups section shows one of the top recommendations is a “Cancer Cures & Natural Healing Research” group, which lists 96,000 members and claims pharmaceutical companies are suppressing natural cancer treatments to maintain their profits.

“The US government poisons babies, practically from birth,” an administrator of the group wrote in a Monday post, falsely alleging links between fluoride and autism in children, saying the government’s support of fluoridated water “goes light years beyond terrorism” and “will cause your baby’s brain to turn into mush.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry about the paywall)