Facebook full screen video is moving from obvious imitation to product test. Tom Alison, the head of Facebook, said the company will try a redesigned app experience later this year that drops some users straight into a full-screen video view when they open Facebook.
The test is Facebook’s clearest admission yet that the old feed, built around friends, pages, groups, Marketplace clutter, and whatever else Meta has bolted on since the Bush administration, is no longer enough to keep attention. Alison said the experiment will start in countries where Facebook has seen strong interest in video, with possible expansion to the US next year.
Facebook’s own explanation is blunt: the company says video is now a place where users talk, build communities, and buy things. In less polished language, TikTok trained a lot of people to expect the app to do the work for them, one swipe at a time.
What is Facebook testing?
Facebook is testing an opening screen that immediately shows full-screen video to a selected group of users. That means the app would behave more like TikTok’s main feed, where video is the default surface rather than a tab or side feature.
Meta has already tried this playbook elsewhere. The company launched Reels on Instagram in 2020 to compete with TikTok’s short-video feed. Now Alison is applying a similar idea to Facebook, even though he told The Verge in 2022 that he saw TikTok as the company chasing Facebook, rather than Facebook chasing TikTok.
The pressure is not theoretical. Meta does not publish separate user totals for each of its apps, but the company’s own figures showed a combined loss of 20 million users across its platforms in the first quarter of 2026. Facebook is still reportedly the world’s most popular social platform, while YouTube sits close behind and TikTok has been gaining fast. TikTok said it passed 1 billion monthly users three years after launch, a faster climb than Facebook’s path to that mark.
Facebook is also copying more than TikTok
The video test is only one piece of a broader attempt to make Facebook look less like one giant aging feed and more like a bundle of specialized apps. Facebook is launching Seller, a standalone app for Marketplace sellers. The company says Seller will let people track performance, manage listings, and message buyers, which puts it in the same practical territory as Craigslist-style classified tools.
Facebook also introduced Forum earlier this year as a separate place for people to use Facebook Groups. The idea resembles Reddit’s subreddit model: communities organized around specific interests, rather than one general-purpose social graph where every uncle, school friend, hobby group, and spammy deal post collides.
There is also a change coming to identity signals on Facebook. Meta Verified, the paid subscription that includes verification badges for Facebook and Instagram, starts at $11.99 per month. Facebook now says it will also offer a free verified badge through a selfie verification process. The company says the goal is to help users see when a profile is tied to a real person.
Taken together, the changes show Meta treating Facebook less like a finished product and more like a parts bin: TikTok for video, Reddit for groups, Craigslist for selling, and a looser version of paid verification for identity. Whether users want all of that inside Facebook is the part the test is supposed to find out.
This story draws on original reporting from The Verge.
