Yep, the future of social media is looking less social.

If you already experience your Instagram feed increasingly showing Reels from accounts you don’t follow, just wait until next year.

From next year the company will more than double the amount of content from recommended accounts people see while using Instagram and Facebook, ready by the end of 2023, said Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Presently, such recommendations currently account for roughly 15 percent of the content on Facebook, and the percentage is already higher on Instagram.

This rollout, described as "building the Discovery engine" will focus on showing posts from a user’s social graph, or list of friends. 

Just as TikTok’s heavy use of AI allows it to serve up videos regardless of where they come from, so too will Meta, with this shift intending to compete with the approach that has quickly made TikTok one of the most used apps in the world and spawned a whole new creator economy.

Zuckerberg said Meta will use AI to recommend all the content people publicly share on its service, such as links or photos and explained “Al finds additional content that people find interesting, that increases engagement and the quality of our feeds.” 

Facebook’s user base is aging and its business is slowing and they do appear to be looking to shift how their feed is architected.  

Lets say it again - the future of social media is looking less social and more based on predictive analytics from machine learning - just how much we will notice the difference will be interesting and a topic of much debate, I imagine.