New Facebook Looks Like Twitter(That’s Not Good)

Raji Ayinla, J.D.
The Open Manuel
Published in
3 min readMar 28, 2020

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Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

I know that Facebook must continue to evolve to keep up with changing tastes lest they meet the fate of yesteryear’s MySpace. But more and more, social media apps are starting to amalgamate into one big homogeneous glop of goo.

The recent Facebook desktop redesign, following the PWA trend, mimics the streamlined app version by emphasizing group stuff and events. The end result is a more censored, more curated, more verbose version of Twitter. By doing this, Facebook hopes to keep up with millenials(they’ve given up on Gen Z)

See, Facebook is facing the issue of “The Influencer.” More people are consuming pictures and videos as opposed to text. The less text you have and the more pictures and videos you produce, the more people like and click and follow. Attentions spans have narrowed drastically so that bells and whistles no longer matter. Just show me a funny ten second video so I can move onto the next one. Influencers monopolize these videos by showing off a slice of their life. These people are not private; they’ve opened up their photos and videos for everyone to watch.

Facebook did not start out with The Influencer in mind from the outset. It was supposed to be a platform that catered to private networks — hence the friend request rather than a random follow. The world has outgrown Facebook, and now…

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Raji Ayinla, J.D.
The Open Manuel

Incoming Law Clerk at U.S. Copyright Office; Winner of the 2021 Boston Patent Law Association Writing Competition; Former Online Editor of the NE Law Review