Facebook is thinking of giving up and becoming TikTok

Facebook is planning major changes to prevent its users from jumping to competing sites like TikTok – changes that sound suspiciously like being a TikTok clone. The CEO of Facebook, Tom Alison, announced today that the platform will begin testing “a reimagined feature” later this year that will put a group of users “full-screen video when they open the app.”

These experimental concepts are beginning to spread to countries with a strong interest in movies, with expansion expected in the US next year. The test is driven by Facebook seeing that “video is where conversations are happening, communities are being created, and even sales are starting to happen” – putting the Meta social network at risk of backfiring. Although Meta does not release user statistics for its platforms, it does aggregate them lost 20 million users in the first quarter of 2026, according to the company’s data.

Facebook says there are still many popular social media sites in the world, but YouTube is the second most, and TikTok is not changed – it passed 1 billion monthly users only three years after the establishment, so much faster than Facebook. Meta launched Reels for Instagram in 2020 to better compete with TikTok, and now it’s trying to do the same with Facebook. This is after Alison said Seaside in 2022 that they see “TikTok chasing Facebook,” not the other way around.

Facebook has grown into a major part of social and business services over the years, and now it’s also using similar platforms to improve user experience. Today it’s launching Seller, a dedicated Craigslist-like app for Marketplace sellers to track their performance, manage listings, and message buyers. Facebook also launched its own Forum program earlier this year that provides a dedicated space for people to interact with Facebook Groups – similar to subreddit groups on Reddit.

Changes are also being made to Facebook user authentication badges, which require a paid subscriptions to Meta Verified which starts at $11.99 per month. Now, Facebook says it’s offering a free verification badge that can be earned by completing a “simple selfie verification process”, with the aim of helping users know that the profile is linked to a real person.