Facebook pledges to help partners adapt new policy

los angeles — Facebook, seeking to calm creators of articles and video after announcing a change in how their work will be promoted in its news feed, sent an e-mail pledging to help them adapt.

Stories and clips that draw comments and likes or are shared by users are more likely to be seen, Facebook said in the e-mail obtained by Bloomberg. The company will also continue to prioritise content that users search for or return regularly to view, such as weekly video series. “We know even a small update to News Feed can be disruptive to you and your talent’s businesses, and this change will take some time to figure out,” the social network said.

“As we take this journey together and focus on content that our community can connect around, we’ll work on providing you and your clients with best practices, insights, and tools to help them understand and create content that promotes these meaningful interactions on Facebook.”

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday he’s making changes because feedback has shown that public content has been “crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”

$3.3b cost of policy change

Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Facebook post is proving expensive. The co-founder of the world’s largest social-media business saw his fortune fall $3.3 billion on Friday after he posted plans to shift users’ news feeds toward content from family and friends at the expense of material from media outlets and businesses.

Shares of Menlo Park, California-based Facebook tumbled 4.5 per cent on Friday in New York, cutting Zuckerberg’s fortune to $74 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.