On Wednesday, January 10, Facebook revealed that the site will undergo major changes.

These changes include limiting viral videos from users’ newsfeed such as memes, cooking videos, fashion clips, and other advertisements. Facebook will now prioritize family and friends’ posts over public content that once overtook the top of Facebook’s newsfeed.

Mark Zuckerburg, Facebook’s owner and founder, thinks there will be a change in how people use Facebook. “I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” said Zuckerberg in an interview with New York Times. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable.”

Facebook currently has 2.07 billion monthly users and is valued at $74 billion.

One of the reasons that Facebook implemented these changes came from a study in December of 2017, which showed how surfing random consumption of information can be bad for a person’s mood.

According to New York Times, this was a follow-up study of a paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Brandon McGill ’18 said that he uses Facebook almost every day, but the recent change won’t affect him that much. “I already look at my family and friends posts, so I don’t think this will affect how often I use Facebook,” he said. “But I guess this is good because I will see more of their posts and they will be the first posts I see on newsfeed.”

Dave Cunningham, an English teacher at Williston, said that he stopped using Facebook because of the various videos and advertisements. “Prior to the change, I stopped using Facebook for four months because I was sick of all of the negativity and I felt like people were causing conflict for no reason.” Cunningham said. “I switched over to Instagram for that reason.”

He also said that he looks forward to the change because he wants to see more of his friends and family’s posts. “Facebook seems like a watered-down product,” he said. “I wanted to see my friends posts and how they were doing. I did not like how a lot of people shared their political views and I was sick of seeing random videos and posts about that sort of stuff.”

Cam Mariani ’19 claimed that this change should be good for Facebook and he is glad that he will be able to see more of his friends posts now.

“It has definitely changed a lot over the years but I think that this is a good change,” said Cam. “I will be able to see more of my friends posts, rather than advertisements that I don’t really pay attention to. I think overall the change is good for Facebook.”