SINGAPORE: For the past decade, Ms Diana Lou has been relying on Facebook for her daily dose of news.
But since the end of last year, the 58-year-old part-time early childhood educator has increasingly found herself having to go directly to the home page of the media outlets that she follows in order to stay abreast of what is happening around the world, instead of simply scrolling through her news feed.
This is because her feed has become increasingly populated by advertisements.
“The (Facebook) news feed is sickening. Now there are more and more advertisements. So I make it such that I purposefully go into the page that I’ve followed (to read the news),” said Ms Lou.
Another user, 32-year-old Joanne Loh, has also noticed the change in her Facebook feed.
While the civil servant said that Facebook continues to be her main source of news, she is nevertheless “mildly frustrated” that the news content that appears on her feed is no longer in chronological order.
“It means that sometimes I’m reading news that’s three days old, and I’m thinking ‘oh, I missed this’,” said Ms Loh, adding that she has observed this occurring more frequently in the last two years or so.
Their experiences reflect the evolving changes that the social media giant has been making to its algorithm, which determines what - and in which order - users see their posts.
Since Mr Mark Zuckerberg and his then dormitory roommates created Facebook in 2004 as a way to connect students at Harvard University, it has greatly disrupted the way news is disseminated and consumed on the world wide web.
A report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in 2016 - more than a decade after Facebook was created - found that more than half of Internet users turned to social media news each week, with Facebook being the top social media news source among those surveyed.
However, over the years, Facebook has tweaked its algorithm from one which prioritises content - including news - based on chronology to one which pushes more targeted ads to users on their feeds, or posts with higher engagement.
Other social media platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, have similarly made changes to how their algorithms work, consequently shaping what and how newsrooms produce their news.
But the biggest change is set to come as the newest kid on the block, TikTok, turns the industry on its head with features that have propelled the short-video platform into superstardom, especially among the young.
The meteoric rise of TikTok, which was launched only six years ago, has been well-documented.
Unlike Facebook and other social media apps before it, TikTok, developed by Chinese tech company ByteDance, recommends content based on users’ interests, rather than which accounts they follow.
This has left Facebook scrambling to catch up, with the latest tweaks to its algorithm, announced in July, mimicking that of TikTok’s. In what has been dubbed as the "TikTokification" of social media, other platforms such as Instagram and YouTube have also tweaked their offerings to try and beat TikTok at its own game.
Industry observers have said that the move to de-emphasise content based on posts from people within users' social circles - and instead letting algorithms dictate which postings should appear on users' feeds based on the machine’s “reading” of their preferences - heralds the end of social media as the world knows it.
“Social media was initially a place where you went to see what was going on with people you knew - friends and family, and later on, people you were interested in following, " said Mr Alan Soon, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Splice Media, which helps to build media start-ups in Asia.
“The assumption was always that you'd be interested in those closest to you, and the algorithms were optimised to deliver that to you.”
But TikTok has “shaken up” that assumption.
“TikTok’s algorithm has shown that people can and will engage with content that's unrelated to them - but yet buzzy enough,” said Mr Soon, who was also a journalist for 20 years.
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