Speaker 1: All Zone Media. Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm
Speaker 1: your host ed ze Tron. Over the last decade, few
Speaker 1: platforms have declined quite as much as Facebook and Instagram.
Speaker 1: What used to be apps for like catching up with
Speaker 1: your friends and family and seeing things from bands you
Speaker 1: might like and now pretty much algorithmic nightmares, and they
Speaker 1: interrupt you constantly with suggested content and advertisements that far
Speaker 1: outweigh the stuff you actually logged onto the platform to see. Conversely,
Speaker 1: those running Facebook groups or pages routinely find that their
Speaker 1: content isn't even being shown to people that follow them,
Speaker 1: and that's all thanks to Meta's basically abusive approach to
Speaker 1: social media. The customer is not only always wrong, but
Speaker 1: they ideally will have little to no control over the
Speaker 1: things that they see on the platform that you monetize
Speaker 1: them on. It's all very frustrating, and in the next
Speaker 1: two episodes, I'm going to walk you through the decline
Speaker 1: of these platforms, in particular Facebook and Meta of course
Speaker 1: as a company, and I'm going to start today with
Speaker 1: the events that led to its decay and those I
Speaker 1: believe are responsible for turning the world's most popular consumer
Speaker 1: apps into skinner box or advertising agencies. In this episode,
Speaker 1: I want to frame Facebook's to cline around two specific
Speaker 1: features people you may know, which is an innocent yet
Speaker 1: kind of horrible feature that really explains itself, and the
Speaker 1: news feed, which is the central hub of information on
Speaker 1: the platform, one that's become so algorithmically charged that it's
Speaker 1: far more about what Facebook wants to show you than
Speaker 1: any conscious action by a user. And it's my belief
Speaker 1: that these products, piloted by the deeply insidious people led
Speaker 1: by Mark Zuckerberg himself, are central to the darkness that
Speaker 1: has enveloped this company. But I want to be clear,
Speaker 1: none of this is really new. It's a common trope that, oh, well,
Speaker 1: Facebook went downhill because they went public, which is partially true,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong, But I really want to be
Speaker 1: clear that the rot began early. Facebook has always been
Speaker 1: a rotten, manipulative company, and they've always acted very little
Speaker 1: regard for their users, even at times when they pretended
Speaker 1: to do so. The goal's always been more, not just
Speaker 1: more money, but more engagement, more time on app, more
Speaker 1: visits to the website, perpetual growth, all mandated by Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg himself, and a rogue's gallery of rot economist assholes.
Speaker 1: But as ever, I need to give you a little
Speaker 1: history lesson, so we need to go back in time.
Speaker 1: We start our story in two thousand and four, a
Speaker 1: few months after the company was founded, when Peter Seal
Speaker 1: became Facebook's first investor, and he put five hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars into the company and got an astonishing ten point
Speaker 1: two percent steak. As you might have seen in twenty
Speaker 1: ten's The Social Network by Aaron Sorkin, Teel was introduced
Speaker 1: to Zuckerberg by Sean Parker, the co founder of Napster
Speaker 1: and if you're a little younger than I am, that
Speaker 1: was a website he used to use to illegally download music,
Speaker 1: and he was fresh from a beat down by Lars
Speaker 1: Auric and Metallica, who again, if you're younger than me,
Speaker 1: much younger, I guess. They sued Sean Parker, who was
Speaker 1: running Napster, which was basically imaginative Spotify was just stealing everything. Anyway,
Speaker 1: They sued him, he had to shut down the website,
Speaker 1: made him very sad. But what was significant about this
Speaker 1: event when Sean Parker introduced Teal to Mark Zuckerberg wasn't
Speaker 1: really the people involved the amount of money, but the
Speaker 1: terms of the deal, terms that would permanently and inextricably
Speaker 1: ruin Facebook forever. Parker, ever the advocate for founders, He
Speaker 1: negotiated with Peter tee Or to allow Mark Zuckerberg to
Speaker 1: retain two of Facebook's five board seats. When Parker resigned
Speaker 1: in two thousand and five, he insisted that Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: be given his seat. Just to be clear, that's three
Speaker 1: out of five board seats for one guy unilateral power.
Speaker 1: While this may have seemed no paul and maybe even
Speaker 1: ideal for a founder in these early days, this single
Speaker 1: move has allowed Mark Zuckerberg to wield complete power over Facebook,
Speaker 1: which I know is now called Meta. And it was
Speaker 1: the first step along a road that made him completely
Speaker 1: impossible to fire, which is doomed to this company, to
Speaker 1: this endless, miserable death march, all thanks to Harvard's most
Speaker 1: quirked up white boy, Mark Zuckerberg. I really cannot express
Speaker 1: how important this moment was. This was when the mistake
Speaker 1: was made, albeit innocently, to keep Zuckerberg in power. I'd
Speaker 1: be kind and suggest that Sean Parker didn't know what
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg was like at this point, other than the fact
Speaker 1: that he absolutely did and he should have known better,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's more about Sean Parker just selecting people poorly.
Speaker 1: I guess we'll never know. A few years later, in
Speaker 1: April two thousand and six, Zuckerberg was once again able
Speaker 1: to negotiate terms that kept him at the top, in
Speaker 1: part thanks to Facebook's pretty strong revenue for the time
Speaker 1: six million dollars a year in revenue, pretty impressive for
Speaker 1: a social network, especially and at the time, by the way,
Speaker 1: very early days, and the fact that he owned three
Speaker 1: out of the five board seats and could do whatever
Speaker 1: the hell he wanted allowed him to pretty much dictate
Speaker 1: the terms. Venture capitalists were desperate to avoid missing out
Speaker 1: in this company had rocket ship growth, and that the
Speaker 1: time my space was actually a very successful business, and
Speaker 1: thus what were they going to do try and negotiate
Speaker 1: with the petty king? Absolutely not, They needed that cash.
Speaker 1: In September two thousand and six, Facebook would launch the newsfeed,
Speaker 1: a relatively unsophisticated chronological feed of your friend's status is
Speaker 1: that is on some level kind of one of the
Speaker 1: most important launches in software history, and it's a great
Speaker 1: example of a good product that got completely bulldozed by
Speaker 1: executives that don't really care about their users and want
Speaker 1: to just use advertising in what algorithms to torture them.
Speaker 1: The feed, which Facebook product manager Rugi sang Give described
Speaker 1: as quite unlike anything you can find on the web,
Speaker 1: led to an immediate revolt within Facebook's nine point five
Speaker 1: million users at the time, as it effectively showed a
Speaker 1: stream of literally every action you took on the platform,
Speaker 1: which users found and I quote creepy and stalker esque,
Speaker 1: according to a group made at the time called Students
Speaker 1: against Facebook Newsfeed. For those who weren't around when it
Speaker 1: launched or didn't use Facebook, which I don't blame you for,
Speaker 1: this is all kind of hard to grasp. It would
Speaker 1: show you literally every activity you and your friends did.
Speaker 1: If you joined or left a group, or made a
Speaker 1: new connection, everyone could see it. It was almost like
Speaker 1: a pnopticon, except you were both the jailer and the prisoner. Somehow.
Speaker 1: A few days later, Zuckerberg would apologize, saying that Facebook
Speaker 1: and I quote really messed this one up, and that
Speaker 1: Facebook spent two days coding non stop to add a
Speaker 1: special privacy page that allowed users to choose which types
Speaker 1: of stories went into the feed while this feature was
Speaker 1: actually released. It's important to know that the rest of
Speaker 1: the world might not have known what you were doing afterwards,
Speaker 1: but Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook absolutely did. This was the
Speaker 1: same year that Facebook opened to the general public. Had
Speaker 1: previously been just for college students, then for certain organizations,
Speaker 1: and I think then they had high schoolers. But then
Speaker 1: they opened up to everyone. And they also turned down
Speaker 1: a billion dollar acquisition offer from Yahoo and signed a
Speaker 1: three year advertising deal with Microsoft. Ah ah who in
Speaker 1: two thousand and six. Who was worth probacar rakavam? Anyway,
Speaker 1: moving on yet, Facebook's rot really began in ernest in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight when a former McKinsey analyst, Yes,
Speaker 1: now the vice president of Global Online Sales and Operations
Speaker 1: at Google will be made chief operating officer. Her name
Speaker 1: was Sheryl Sandberg, and she'd be the force that would
Speaker 1: grow Facebook into one of the most evil companies alive.
Speaker 1: Now that I've given you the basic history and the
Speaker 1: basic terms here, you've got Mark Zuckerberg completely empower, cannot
Speaker 1: be fired, never will be fired. And then you've got
Speaker 1: a COO chief operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, former McKinsey, analyst
Speaker 1: chief of staff under Larry Summers's Department of Treasury. A
Speaker 1: real management consultant brain is in here, and it's only
Speaker 1: going to get worse. According to an excerpt from Stephen
Speaker 1: Levy's Facebook The Inside Story, sometime in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: Facebook's growth had stalled somewhere around ninety million users, with
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg telling Levy in an interview that his company had
Speaker 1: hit a wall. Shamath Paliapatia, a former venture capitalist who
Speaker 1: was at the time Facebook's VP of Platform and Monetization,
Speaker 1: came to Mark Zuckerberg with an idea the Facebook should
Speaker 1: focus on a new metric, monthly active users. This metric,
Speaker 1: which is now a cornerstone of most tech companies growth metrics,
Speaker 1: would be a measure of whether the users were actually
Speaker 1: sticking around on the platform, and boosting this number would
Speaker 1: mean that users were coming to Facebook and they were staying.
Speaker 1: Please remember this metric. It's going to be important in
Speaker 1: the second episode, an even more important right now. In
Speaker 1: a meeting with Zuckerberg and Sandberg, Shamath was asked to
Speaker 1: name it, and he came up with the term maus.
Speaker 1: Samberg responded that they should just call it growth. At
Speaker 1: the next board meeting, Shamath would present what Levy would
Speaker 1: call aggressive growth techniques that would double or even triple
Speaker 1: Facebook's user base and then use the platform itself as
Speaker 1: an engine for growth. After a tepid response at the meeting,
Speaker 1: Shamouth was given license to build a new growth team
Speaker 1: from both within and outside of Facebook, one that would
Speaker 1: eventually become pretty much the most evil super team in tech,
Speaker 1: like the Avengers of Assholes, including Facebook head of Product
Speaker 1: Naomi gLite and Alex Schultz, who go on to become
Speaker 1: Meta's Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Analytics, along with
Speaker 1: fellow teammate Javier olivan who replaced Samberg as chief operating
Speaker 1: officer in twenty twenty two. All of these people, now,
Speaker 1: by the way, have senior roles at the company. I
Speaker 1: want you to remember that throughout this story, Glight, Olivin,
Speaker 1: and Schultz are at the epicenter of almost every single
Speaker 1: choice that Meta has made to put growth above the
Speaker 1: user experience. Shamath wanted their team, which also included early
Speaker 1: Facebook data scientists Danny Ferrante and Blake Ross, who previously
Speaker 1: co created the Firefox web browser, to become and I
Speaker 1: quote the growth circle, what Levy refers to as a
Speaker 1: power center in the company, with special status and distinctive subcultures.
Speaker 1: Not great, but he succeeded. Chamath succeeded. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, Facebook would launch a feature called People You
Speaker 1: May Know, a seemingly innocent feature that would, as the
Speaker 1: name suggests, suggest people that you might know on Facebook.
Speaker 1: Yet this feature seemed a little too good at its job.
Speaker 1: With reporter Kashmir Hill, who spent over a year investigating
Speaker 1: the feature book Gizmoda between twenty sixteen and twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: Hill said that it mined information users didn't have control
Speaker 1: over to make connections that they might not actually want
Speaker 1: to make, such as suggesting patients find their psychiatrist or
Speaker 1: outing a sex workers real name to her clients. Despite
Speaker 1: doggedly researching People You May Know, He'll never really got
Speaker 1: Facebook to explain how it works. Nevertheless, Stephen Levy was
Speaker 1: able to get Shamath to reveal one horrifying detail. The
Speaker 1: Facebook's growth team would take out Google ads on people's names,
Speaker 1: targeting those who hadn't joined Facebook, with something called a
Speaker 1: dark profile, a fake link that would suggest that somebody
Speaker 1: was already using your name on Facebook, conning you into
Speaker 1: going to the saite. This is absolutely goddamn disgraceful. It's
Speaker 1: insane to me that more people know about this and
Speaker 1: more people aren't angrier. And by the way, you're wondering
Speaker 1: how they found out who the Facebook hold outs. Where
Speaker 1: you wondering where that came from, Well, it's because they
Speaker 1: would happily ingest your entire contact list, allowing them to
Speaker 1: see which friends were on there and which weren't using
Speaker 1: that data. And you may think edge you jump into
Speaker 1: bloody conclusions. You just put in words in their mouth incorrect.
Speaker 1: Now the CTO of Facebook guy called Boz Andrew Bosworth,
Speaker 1: and I'll get to him later. He's already said, quite
Speaker 1: literally that that feature was justifiable. But we continue. While
Speaker 1: many might consider people you may know as a well
Speaker 1: meaning feature, indeed a useful one for a social network,
Speaker 1: the algorithm behind the service is powerful and sinister, and
Speaker 1: it's capable of dragging up these distant relationships honed in
Speaker 1: by both the data you give Facebook and other shadowy
Speaker 1: sources that we may never know. I do, however, believe
Speaker 1: there's another person responsible, a man named Lars Bakstrom, a
Speaker 1: relatively unknown yet extremely powerful figure in Facebook's history. Backstrom's
Speaker 1: LinkedIn notes that he built pymk people you may know,
Speaker 1: and he built its back end infrastructure and machine learning
Speaker 1: system starting from September two thousand and nine through February
Speaker 1: twenty twelve. In twenty thirteen, and this is nasty by
Speaker 1: the way, Backstrom published a paper in tandem with a
Speaker 1: computer scientist called John Kleinberg, and it was called Romantic
Speaker 1: Partnerships and the Dispersion of Social Ties. A network analysis
Speaker 1: of relationship status on Facebook. Try saying that fast twice.
Speaker 1: It's actually very difficult. This paper focuses on an algorithm
Speaker 1: that was able to independently identify someone's spouse according to
Speaker 1: the time Stephen Law, sixty percent of the time, and
Speaker 1: it was even capable of predicting when someone would break
Speaker 1: up with someone else. The paper hinged on the idea
Speaker 1: that mutual friends isn't really an indicator of a couple's
Speaker 1: relationship status, but rather the dispersion of those mutual friends
Speaker 1: the amount of mutual friends that are also mutual friends
Speaker 1: with each other. This is a sensible idea that when
Speaker 1: framed as an algorithm made by an engineer who made
Speaker 1: Facebook's extremely successful growth tool feels a lot more creepy.
Speaker 1: Backstrom in a twenty ten talk relayed again by Stephen Levy,
Speaker 1: said that people you may know accounted for a significant
Speaker 1: chunk of all friending on Facebook, and that friends of
Speaker 1: friends are the most powerful part of the tool. People
Speaker 1: you may know as power wasn't just that it found
Speaker 1: people that you knew well, but people that you kind
Speaker 1: of saw on you, offering you the tantalizing idea of
Speaker 1: proximity to them, and when you're friended them, Facebook's news
Speaker 1: feed would automatically make their content more prevalent, forcing a
Speaker 1: kind of into mercy that may not have actually existed
Speaker 1: by making a new connection even if it was super tangential,
Speaker 1: and the feed made it feel more immediate, giving Facebook
Speaker 1: more power over you and also actively manipulating. And this
Speaker 1: isn't even the half of them. This subtle feature is
Speaker 1: responsible for much of Facebook's growth, and it was deliberately
Speaker 1: engineered by rot economists like Schultz, Klite and Olivin to
Speaker 1: do so at any cost, even if it endangered the
Speaker 1: lives of children. And by the way, I'm not being dramatic.
Speaker 1: According to the Wall Street Journal. In twenty eighteen, David Irb,
Speaker 1: an engineer in charge of one of Facebook's community integrity teams,
Speaker 1: found that and I quote, the most frequent way adults
Speaker 1: found children to pray upon was using people you may know.
Speaker 1: The journal also reported that a few days later, Herb
Speaker 1: found that Meta was planning to add encryption to the
Speaker 1: Facebook messages system on the platform, something that would prevent
Speaker 1: the company from fixing this problem, and he threatened to
Speaker 1: resign in process. Now you'd think at this point that
Speaker 1: the company would go, ah, yeah, that sounds dangerous, so
Speaker 1: I probably don't want it. No, no, no. They placed
Speaker 1: him on administrative leave, and then he eventually resigned. Facebook,
Speaker 1: by the way, did introduce encryption to its mesas despite
Speaker 1: Herb's stark warning, and this is a quote, that millions
Speaker 1: of pedophiles were targeting tens of millions of children. People
Speaker 1: you may know was and is a dangerous tool. And
Speaker 1: it was created and maintained and proliferated by people that
Speaker 1: now effectively run Meta. Schultz is the CMO, Bosworth is
Speaker 1: the CTO. Olivan is the COO Glit is a head
Speaker 1: of product and from what I've been told by sources,
Speaker 1: pretty much the Darth Vader to Mark Zuckerberg's Emperor. And
Speaker 1: if you've not watched Star Wars, just google it. I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna help you there. Once. Palliopetia left Facebook in
Speaker 1: twenty eleven to start a venture capital firm his team Schultz,
Speaker 1: gLite and Olivan. They continued to accumulate power, and as
Speaker 1: I've mentioned, I believe these people, along with Lars Bakstrom,
Speaker 1: are responsible for making people you may know, into this reckless, dangerous,
Speaker 1: scurrilous growth tool for a company that doesn't really seem
Speaker 1: to give a shit about its users. But we continue
Speaker 1: because they're not done writing yet. In January twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: that's when it really would set in, with the launch
Speaker 1: of sponsored stories in Facebook's news feed, which Josh Constein,
Speaker 1: allegedly a journalist at the time, claimed he would rather
Speaker 1: see inform him about the activity of friends than traditional
Speaker 1: ads that can be much less relevant, a statement that
Speaker 1: frames exactly how little the tech media criticized this company.
Speaker 1: Makes me feel crazy. He also added one interesting tidbit.
Speaker 1: The Facebook are tested letting advertisers pay for sponsored content
Speaker 1: in the news feed in two thousand and six, but
Speaker 1: discontinued doing so in two thousand and eight because they
Speaker 1: decided to advertisers shouldn't be able to show content in
Speaker 1: the news feed unless it could appear there naturally, a
Speaker 1: statement that Constein wrote without a single hint of alarm.
Speaker 1: Isn't that funny though? He is really funny that half
Speaker 1: of these companies, they've said at some point now will
Speaker 1: never build the Torment nexus. Then it decade later like, yep,
Speaker 1: we got the Sawmant nexus going fellas it looks great
Speaker 1: s making US billions anyway. In February twenty twelve, last Backstrom,
Speaker 1: as mentioned the architect to People you may know, would
Speaker 1: move over to manage Facebook's news feed rankings, and then
Speaker 1: a few months later, Facebook would acquire Instagram for a
Speaker 1: billion dollars, possibly one of the best acquisitions in history,
Speaker 1: at least for a company. In May twenty twelve, Facebook
Speaker 1: would have what would be considered a disastrous IPO, with
Speaker 1: Wall Street concerned about its lack of growth on mobile devices.
Speaker 1: After its first day of trading, the share price was
Speaker 1: barely over its debut, and by September it had shared
Speaker 1: more than half of its value. Something had to change,
Speaker 1: and sometime in twenty twelve, Facebook would find one man,
Speaker 1: one man who could fix these problems. They'd promote a
Speaker 1: product manager called Adam Masseri to the head of Facebook's
Speaker 1: newsfeed division. It was during this period when it started
Speaker 1: recommending content into your feed. In Mark Zuckerberg's statement of
Speaker 1: intent to potential investors in Facebook's IPO, a standard letter
Speaker 1: that you'll see in pretty much every run up to
Speaker 1: a public offering, he declared that there was a huge
Speaker 1: need and huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected. Well,
Speaker 1: what I like to know is phase one of Facebook's decline.
Speaker 1: Behind the curtain. Zuckerbug's vision wasn't to, by the way,
Speaker 1: get everyone connected in the world or anything like that.
Speaker 1: He wanted to connect everyone in the world to Facebook,
Speaker 1: and by the end of twenty twelve, the site had
Speaker 1: a billion users, or about seventh of humanity. He also
Speaker 1: made one very weird statement in this letter. He said
Speaker 1: that Facebook didn't build services to make money, but they
Speaker 1: made money to build services, and as I'll shortly reveal,
Speaker 1: he was completely lying. Look, I'm on a level with you.
Speaker 1: For over a decade, Facebook has deliberately made itself worse
Speaker 1: to make more money. Thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and his
Speaker 1: growth team perpetuating a culture that manipulates and tortures users
Speaker 1: to make number go up. It really is that simple.
Speaker 1: While reporting this, I genuinely had to check with multiple
Speaker 1: people just to make sure I hadn't accidentally written a
Speaker 1: rot economy fan fiction piece. This shit is completely bonkers
Speaker 1: and also a lot of its public has no one
Speaker 1: put anyway. In a twenty sixteen memo leaked a BuzzFeed.
Speaker 1: Several years ago, then vice president Andrew bos Bosworth, now
Speaker 1: Facebook's chief technology officer, wrote a horrifying screed. It's a
Speaker 1: real stomach turner, and it romanticized Facebook's growth at all
Speaker 1: cost culture. Boss want to name no if that connecting
Speaker 1: people on Facebook, and these are quotes, by the way,
Speaker 1: may cost a life by exposing someone to bullies, and
Speaker 1: that and again I quote, maybe someone dies in a
Speaker 1: terrorist attack coordinated using Facebook's tools, but that because Facebook's
Speaker 1: mission was to connect people, all the work that Facebook
Speaker 1: does in growth is justified. Boss makes it clear that
Speaker 1: this is a moral judgment by adding that again I quote,
Speaker 1: all questionable contact important practices such as the one by
Speaker 1: the way that I mentioned with people. You may know,
Speaker 1: all the subtle language that helps people stay searchable to
Speaker 1: their friends, which again refers to terms and conditions, and
Speaker 1: all the work that Facebook does to bring more communication
Speaker 1: in was justified in the pursuit of growth. This man,
Speaker 1: this horrible, nasty man, is the chief technology officer of
Speaker 1: meta and he's the mastermind, by the way, behind both metas,
Speaker 1: Metaverse and their artificial intelligence goals. This is the guy.
Speaker 1: This is the guy. Anyway, as I'll explain and as
Speaker 1: you can probably kind of work out right now, Facebook
Speaker 1: is culturally a rot economy company. It is at its
Speaker 1: core a growth at all costs enterprise, and they will
Speaker 1: make any changes they need to make their products, make
Speaker 1: a number go up, and it can be as simple
Speaker 1: as revenue, or it can be a completely made up
Speaker 1: number that they made just to make Mark Zuckerbok happy.
Speaker 1: In December twenty twenty, a Facebook engineer published a document
Speaker 1: that they wrote in twenty nineteen called when User Engagement
Speaker 1: Doesn't Equal User Value? Shared with me by a source
Speaker 1: that assures me that these documents are available through Harvard.
Speaker 1: This remarkable document is a stark warning one posted internally
Speaker 1: at the company, and it's warning them that Facebook's brutal
Speaker 1: focus on user engagement and I quote time spent on
Speaker 1: the app damages the user experience and the person in question.
Speaker 1: They explain it through the context of cable TV versus
Speaker 1: broadcast TV, and how cable TV needs to maximize its
Speaker 1: value for their fixed fee options, and that broadcast TV
Speaker 1: needs to maximize people watching shows intently because one makes
Speaker 1: money off of subscription and one makes money off of advertisement,
Speaker 1: which means people need to really watch it in the
Speaker 1: case of broad cost TV, and what the engineer was
Speaker 1: getting at when they were talking about this was that
Speaker 1: this sometimes leads broadcast television to do some nasty things,
Speaker 1: some kind of anti user things, by having constant recaps,
Speaker 1: padding scenes with flashbacks, adding cliffhangers, giving people a reason
Speaker 1: to keep watching that isn't just the show's good. But
Speaker 1: I'm going to continue here. The engineer then goes on
Speaker 1: to explain several ways that Facebook has deliberately made its
Speaker 1: products worse to maximize engagement. He lists the Facebook deliberately
Speaker 1: limited the amount of information and notifications to make people
Speaker 1: come to the site to increase engagement, as people had
Speaker 1: to keep checking to see what was happening and couldn't
Speaker 1: rely on notifications for well, I don't know notifying them
Speaker 1: about stuff. The Engineering Question referred to this as a
Speaker 1: clear value engagement trade off. Facebook also deliberately stopped sending
Speaker 1: out emails telling people what happened on their feed, so
Speaker 1: that they would have to visit the site. Facebook would also,
Speaker 1: by maximizing time spent on the site, incentivize a kind
Speaker 1: of bad ranking, I imagine, because when you're incentivizing things
Speaker 1: to keep people on the site, you're not actually trying
Speaker 1: to show them the things they want. You're trying to
Speaker 1: get in the way of it. One other not is
Speaker 1: Facebook's algorithm kept prioritizing headlines that said misleading things and
Speaker 1: subtly exaggerated things to get people to click links, and
Speaker 1: the Engineering Question says it did this all the time,
Speaker 1: and the solution to deal with it, again quoting was
Speaker 1: very crude. To be clear, all of these things would
Speaker 1: deliberate actions by Facebook. Facebook could have more information in
Speaker 1: notifications than indeed they used to. Facebook could get rid
Speaker 1: of clickbaity stuff like this, but doing that would bring
Speaker 1: the numbers down, and that just isn't gonna make Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg happy. This piece was a dire warning to Facebook's
Speaker 1: internal staff, and it includes new most really worrying warnings
Speaker 1: about what the company's doing to keep people engaged. It's
Speaker 1: laired with evidence from news in academia. The engineer warns
Speaker 1: that higher Facebook use is correlated to worse psychological states
Speaker 1: that an experiment found that a month long break from
Speaker 1: Facebook improved self reported well being in people. They found
Speaker 1: that a large fraction of Facebook users struggled with their
Speaker 1: Facebook and Instagram use, and that a significant minority of users,
Speaker 1: about three point one percent of them at the time,
Speaker 1: reported serious problems with sleep, work, or relationships that they
Speaker 1: attributed directly to Facebook, and concerns or preoccupations with how
Speaker 1: they used the website. Underneath these warnings, the engineer gave
Speaker 1: some suggested solutions, and they noted that over the last
Speaker 1: couple of years, Facebook's news feed has slowly switched from
Speaker 1: maximizing time spent towards maximizing sessions, meaning that Facebook had
Speaker 1: now changed to focus less on how long a user
Speaker 1: was on the platform and more towards how many times
Speaker 1: they visited, which the engineer noted was a strong predictor
Speaker 1: of problematic use. This document, again, just to be clear,
Speaker 1: written in twenty nine, published in twenty twenty, it really frames,
Speaker 1: how craven Facebook was about twisting its users habits, and
Speaker 1: how intimately aware the company was of these problems. One
Speaker 1: commenter on the piece added, in a larger thought about
Speaker 1: addiction that they personally worried that driving sessions incentivized Facebook
Speaker 1: to make its products more addictive without providing much more value,
Speaker 1: and that, my friends, is exactly what Facebook has become,
Speaker 1: a gratuitor social experiment where the customer is manipulated to
Speaker 1: make a number go up. And for over a decade,
Speaker 1: as I have said, Facebook has knowingly and repeatedly taken
Speaker 1: these steps to maximize activities on the website at the
Speaker 1: direct cost of the user experience, and they've made countless
Speaker 1: tweets for the product to increase internal metrics, metrics obsessed
Speaker 1: over by Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Schultz, and Haavier Olivan. In
Speaker 1: another document from October twenty twenty provided to me by
Speaker 1: the same source, an engineer explained why the Facebook app
Speaker 1: took on sessions as a top line metric. In twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: this piece posted on an internal channel centered around Facebook's
Speaker 1: app strategy of building and I quote socially powered services
Speaker 1: that were focused on and I quote again the possibilities
Speaker 1: of what people could do with Facebook, largely because Facebook
Speaker 1: is no easy way to measure how it's satisfied news
Speaker 1: and needs. And by the way, that last part is
Speaker 1: a quote. This document's important because it reveals some very
Speaker 1: very specific details about the company, such as that in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, Mark Zuckerberg unilaterally decided that time spent on
Speaker 1: Facebook was a top level engagement goal and forced it
Speaker 1: upon the News team despite their protest that it was
Speaker 1: too easy to game. Now you may think too easy
Speaker 1: to game, right, that's referring to exterior actors. Surely, right,
Speaker 1: there's just some people who would manipulate the feed. No no,
Speaker 1: no, no no. When someone at Facebook says something is too
Speaker 1: easy to game, it means that they're warning that people
Speaker 1: at Facebook will build products specifically to game the system
Speaker 1: to hit those metrics, even if it means making them worse,
Speaker 1: such as in the case of time spent on the app,
Speaker 1: making the product more convoluted to use, meaning that people
Speaker 1: use the app more because it takes more effort to
Speaker 1: do the thing you want to. Hey, this kind of
Speaker 1: reminds me of something when propagard Ragavan led a coup
Speaker 1: to take over Google search from Ben Gomes mentioned this
Speaker 1: few episodes ago. Is specific obsession was with queries or
Speaker 1: how many searches people made on Google. Mark Zuckerberg is
Speaker 1: effectively doing the same thing here demanding In twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned that Facebook increased two specific metrics daily
Speaker 1: active people and time spent on the app, and he
Speaker 1: was looking for a perpetual increase ten percent year of
Speaker 1: a year. It didn't matter if these things made the
Speaker 1: product worse or didn't actually to show that their users
Speaker 1: were happy here, enjoying the website, or found it useful.
Speaker 1: All that matters was the number went up. But I continue.
Speaker 1: The document notes that in twenty seventeen, engagement metrics started
Speaker 1: to take a dive, but the company's focus on time
Speaker 1: spent meant that nobody actually noticed because the number that
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg cared about was going up until the alarm
Speaker 1: was sounded by some internal engineers, and then Facebook moved
Speaker 1: to the concept of sessions. To be clear, time spent
Speaker 1: always stuck around, but it was no longer the prize
Speaker 1: pig that must be fattened up. In this document, they
Speaker 1: discuss a term called meaningful interactions, which is the underlying
Speaker 1: metric which allegedly guides Facebook today. In January twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: Adam Masseeri, then head of Newsfeed, would post an update
Speaker 1: about the feed, claiming it would now prioritize posts that
Speaker 1: spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people, which may explain
Speaker 1: both the chaos and the rot in the news feed thereafter.
Speaker 1: And to be clear, you've really got to think about that,
Speaker 1: got to think about what he meant with that. Prioritize
Speaker 1: posts to spark conversations and meaningful interactions sounds like engagement
Speaker 1: bait to me. And if you've used Facebook at any
Speaker 1: time in the last few years, I don't think you're
Speaker 1: going to disagree. As I've said, metrics around time spent
Speaker 1: hung around this company like a stinky fart, especially with
Speaker 1: regard to video, and Facebook has repeatedly and intentionally made
Speaker 1: changes to manipulate its users to satisfy these metrics. In
Speaker 1: his book Broken Code, Jeff Horwitz notes that Facebook changed
Speaker 1: its news feed design to encourage people to click on
Speaker 1: the reshare button or follow a page when they view
Speaker 1: the post, with engineers altering the Facebook algorithm to increase
Speaker 1: how often users saw content reshared from people they didn't know, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, think about that for a second. They
Speaker 1: changed the algorithm to make your feed more full of
Speaker 1: stuff that was not people you knew, just strangers just
Speaker 1: so annoying. Horwitz also notes that Facebook began hunting for
Speaker 1: and I quote friction, anything that was slowing users down
Speaker 1: or limiting their activity, with the goal of eliminating it,
Speaker 1: something that manifested in Facebook allowing users to create an
Speaker 1: unlimited amount of pages and cross posts the same material
Speaker 1: to multiple groups at once, and even a change to
Speaker 1: people you may know that prioritized recommending accounts that were
Speaker 1: likely to accept a friend request. Naturally, this led to
Speaker 1: negative incentives, and in an internal document from twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: called the friend in one percent inequality in Friending, an
Speaker 1: unnamed internal Facebook worker noted that Facebook's aggressive optimization to
Speaker 1: make people send friend requests had created a weird situation
Speaker 1: where point five percent of Facebook accounts were responsible for
Speaker 1: fifty percent of friend requests. Worse still, accounts that were
Speaker 1: less than fifteen days old now made up twenty percent
Speaker 1: of all outgoing friend requests, and more than half of
Speaker 1: friend requests were sent by somebody who was making more
Speaker 1: than fifty of them a day. Heavily suggesting that Facebook
Speaker 1: was basically growing its platform by allowing spammers to spam.
Speaker 1: It's astonishing how stupid this company is. Or maybe they're
Speaker 1: quite brilliant if you just think of them as a
Speaker 1: deeply evil and manipulative software company built to grow metrics
Speaker 1: and revenue, in which case they're amazing. In a later
Speaker 1: document published in mid twenty nineteen, another engineer proposes limiting
Speaker 1: the amount of invites that Facebook users can cent to groups,
Speaker 1: specifically noting that and I quote a larger proportion of
Speaker 1: invites into bad groups come from a small subset of
Speaker 1: whale inviters that sent out massive amounts of invites in
Speaker 1: a small amount of time, specifically noting that this effect
Speaker 1: was really helping vaccine misinformation groups, which posed and I
Speaker 1: quote an integrity and product relevant risk to the company.
Speaker 1: A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg grudgingly established some limits
Speaker 1: on invites. It's not really clear what they are, though.
Speaker 1: For Facebook and Meta at large, anything that might get
Speaker 1: in the way of growth is kind of an oh.
Speaker 1: Sometime in twenty twenty, another document I've reviewed through the
Speaker 1: same source proposed limiting the distribution as in the recommendation
Speaker 1: of groups before they've proven to be trustworthy. So give
Speaker 1: you an example here. The idea would be that if
Speaker 1: a group came up that was outwardly racist or anti
Speaker 1: vags or I don't know, a January sixth style group,
Speaker 1: just throwing that out there, you would want to stop
Speaker 1: them from being recommended to others so they don't grow
Speaker 1: and do something bad like I don't know, visit Washington DC.
Speaker 1: The problem, as the unnamed engineer describes, is that and
Speaker 1: I quote, unproven movements were able to get traction on
Speaker 1: Facebook way before community standards could review them, and some
Speaker 1: of them were gaining millions of followers in a single day,
Speaker 1: and that the groups had immediately began to violate community standards.
Speaker 1: And yeah, by the way, if you're thinking that this
Speaker 1: ends with me saying and then Facebook realized that this
Speaker 1: was a problem and they changed something, You're wrong. They
Speaker 1: did nothing. Facebook never put any limitation. They never did.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that they're going to claim they have, but
Speaker 1: its bollocks in broken code. Hollwitz notes that quote, even
Speaker 1: when the safety benefits were high and the business risks
Speaker 1: were low, Facebook would choose not to use its emergency
Speaker 1: break the glass playbooks to take action, which by the way,
Speaker 1: were their emergency see things that allowed them to quickly
Speaker 1: make groups have to review every post, and various other measures.
Speaker 1: And even when Facebook used these measures, it was very
Speaker 1: quick to roll them back. Holwitz gives an example of
Speaker 1: the run up to Myanmar's twenty twenty election, when the
Speaker 1: company rolled out the break the glass measures, limiting the
Speaker 1: spread of reshared content and replacing it with content from
Speaker 1: user's friends. These countermeasures were quite successful, and they produced
Speaker 1: an impressive twenty five percent reduction in viral inflammatory posts
Speaker 1: and a forty nine percent reduction in viral hoax photos,
Speaker 1: and it only cost them about two percent of meaningful
Speaker 1: social interactions, which was facebooks and is Facebook's most favorite metric.
Speaker 1: Holwitz then notes that despite the small change in engagement,
Speaker 1: an internal team chose to roll these changes back a
Speaker 1: few months later. Can't stop that number going up. But
Speaker 1: I got a worse story. This one, This one really
Speaker 1: turns my stomach. One particularly horrible story, and it really
Speaker 1: pisses me off, is one of something called Project Daisy,
Speaker 1: which was a pilot program that would remove likes from
Speaker 1: Instagram in an attempt to reduce the anxiety and negative
Speaker 1: feelings that teenagers felt using the app, and this idea,
Speaker 1: by the way, it was retired after Adam Masseerri, who
Speaker 1: is now the head of Instagram, claimed it had a
Speaker 1: and I quote very little impact and the result was neutral,
Speaker 1: relegating it to a feature I have to opt into. Yet.
Speaker 1: A complaint filed by several US states, including California and
Speaker 1: New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania in May twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three quoted a Meta researcher saying that project Daisy, so
Speaker 1: turning off visible likes on Instagram, was one of the
Speaker 1: clearest things supported by research that Meta could do to
Speaker 1: positively impact social comparison and well being on Instagram, and
Speaker 1: they advocated for shipping it, with another researcher saying that
Speaker 1: Daisy is such a rare case where a product intervention
Speaker 1: can improve well being for almost everyone that uses Meta's products. Chillingly,
Speaker 1: one Meta employee said that if Meta refused to implement
Speaker 1: Daisy despite the research, they were doubtful that Meta would
Speaker 1: implement any broad product changes with the purpose of improving
Speaker 1: user well being. I think we can all agree they
Speaker 1: were correct that story. Just it's so disgusting because usually
Speaker 1: with these big tech companies, they do something horrible and
Speaker 1: you kind of have to work backwards. You're like, okay,
Speaker 1: so they probably did it for this reason. This was
Speaker 1: something where Adam Messeri utter scumbag lied. He lied so
Speaker 1: that Facebook could make this, so that Facebook could handwave
Speaker 1: away not doing something that would help many people, including
Speaker 1: millions of children, and then lied. And it's just disgraceful.
Speaker 1: These people have names. These people's names need to be
Speaker 1: attached with the word scumbag and lyar it's so disgusting. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the suit in question is labyrinthine, and it specifically makes
Speaker 1: one allegation aligns with the current state of both of
Speaker 1: Facebook and Instagram. And I quote that Meta's algorithm alters
Speaker 1: users experience on the platform and draws on witting users
Speaker 1: into rabbit holes of algorithmically curated material. And as I've
Speaker 1: mentioned before, the people involved from the very beginning are
Speaker 1: those perpetuating this abuse of users. An email thread from
Speaker 1: late twenty seventeen and early twenty eighteen, cited on page
Speaker 1: fifty four of the aforementioned complaint is one between Adamisari
Speaker 1: and other executives discussing significant declients in US engagement metrics
Speaker 1: naming how reducing notifications was associated with reduced engagement, with
Speaker 1: an unnamed employee stating that there would be a trade
Speaker 1: off between making a better notification experience for users and
Speaker 1: recovering flailing numbers in Facebook's daily active people metric. In
Speaker 1: the same thread, chief product officer Chris Cox said that
Speaker 1: if the team believed that a filtered notification experience was better,
Speaker 1: they shouldn't make changes because the metric was down, adding
Speaker 1: that Meta needed to get better at making the harder
Speaker 1: decisions when the main decision criteria was choosing the customer
Speaker 1: experience over a particular metric. The then VP of Analytics
Speaker 1: now chief marketing officer Alex Schultz responded that he fundamentally
Speaker 1: believed that Meta abused the notifications channel as a company.
Speaker 1: Though the suit doesn't quote the rest of the thread,
Speaker 1: it notes that the director of Growth, Andrew Bocking, ended
Speaker 1: the discussion by saying that Meta would prioritize engagement over
Speaker 1: reducing notifications and that he just got clear input from
Speaker 1: Naomi gLite that US daily active people is a bigger
Speaker 1: concern for Mark Zuckerberg right now than user experience. Fuck. Look,
Speaker 1: when I wrote about Probacar Ragavan's destruction of Google Search.
Speaker 1: It was a lot harder to find real, tangible proof
Speaker 1: of his actions that one could easily chart a path
Speaker 1: of intent in how he wanted to increase queries and
Speaker 1: revenue in Google Search at any cost, even if it
Speaker 1: men making changes to make it worse. But in Matter's case,
Speaker 1: it's just so much easier. Mark Zuckerberg is personally responsible
Speaker 1: for the state of Facebook and Instagram today, and he's
Speaker 1: assembled this marvel super team of growth fiends that will
Speaker 1: at times happily and times begrudgingly make the user experience
Speaker 1: worse to increase engagement. And it isn't even a new
Speaker 1: phenomenon from the early days of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is
Speaker 1: acted without remorse. He's tricked, he's schemed, he's screwed over others,
Speaker 1: and it's all in pursuit of dominance and financial gain
Speaker 1: and growth. And it's absolutely goddamn disgusting. Yet Zuckerberg could
Speaker 1: not do these things, He could not perpetuate these disgusting
Speaker 1: acts without the help of people like Chief marketing officer
Speaker 1: Alex Schultz, who saw to it that Meta shut down
Speaker 1: crowd Tangle, a public inside tool from Meta that allowed
Speaker 1: researchers to easily analyze what was happening on the platform.
Speaker 1: Jeff Horwitz's notes in Broken Code that Facebook, led by Schultz,
Speaker 1: killed crowd Tangle because reporter Kevin Ruth kept posting a
Speaker 1: list of Facebook's most engaged with content and that Facebook
Speaker 1: was dominated with right wing assholes and lunacy in misinformation
Speaker 1: like the movie Plandemic, an obvious COVID conspiracy film that
Speaker 1: Joel Kaplan, head of Meta's public policy team and a
Speaker 1: former Googler, by the way, initially blocked the health team
Speaker 1: from removing until rus reported that it was Facebook's number
Speaker 1: one post. Just to be abundantly goddamn clear, the head
Speaker 1: of public policy at Facebook deliberately allowed the spread of
Speaker 1: COVID conspiracies and would have continued to do so if
Speaker 1: a reporter had not used a Facebook tool to show
Speaker 1: them how popular the post was and the result. By
Speaker 1: the way, they killed the tool that allowed Kevin in
Speaker 1: Rous to find out that this happened. Thanks Alex. Every
Speaker 1: single terrible thing you see on Facebook, be it some
Speaker 1: sort of insane right wing free or a confusing, annoying
Speaker 1: product decision, every single thing has been done and pushed
Speaker 1: in pursuit of growth. Every bit of damage that matter
Speaker 1: as course to the world has been either an active
Speaker 1: ignorance or an act of deliberate harm, and many times
Speaker 1: tweaking the product to make it harder or more annoying
Speaker 1: to use so that you'll log onto Facebook or Instagram
Speaker 1: multiple times a day and spend as much time on
Speaker 1: the app as possible. This should also explain why both
Speaker 1: Instagram and Facebook are just so terrible to use. Meta's
Speaker 1: company culture is one of sycovancy and user abuse, and
Speaker 1: both of these apps are deliberately engineered to get in
Speaker 1: the way of once you want to do as a
Speaker 1: means of increasing your engagement, even if that engagement is
Speaker 1: one because the thing you're engaging with is actively fighting you.
Speaker 1: And the rock begins at the top. And all of
Speaker 1: these horrifying, infuriating, disgusting, stomach changing choices have been perpetuated
Speaker 1: by Mark Zuckerberg and he's enforcer, Naomi Glait, making demands
Speaker 1: of engineers desperate to appease the almighty uck having to
Speaker 1: and I quote Horwitz, be careful not to frame decisions
Speaker 1: in terms of right and wrong, because god damn, we
Speaker 1: won't want Mark Zuckerberg having a fucking conscience. All right,
Speaker 1: let me calm down for a second story. But this
Speaker 1: really is the petty king of the tech industry, a
Speaker 1: multi billionaire that can never be fired. That's billions of
Speaker 1: people on websites that he's deliberately made worse to boost
Speaker 1: engagement rather than provide any kind of service for a
Speaker 1: company that makes billions and billions and billions of dollars.
Speaker 1: You can probably hear how frustrated I am with this company,
Speaker 1: and I apologize if I've gone a little bit off
Speaker 1: the depend but Mark Zuckerberg is a goddamn scumbag, and
Speaker 1: he hurts his users for profit. The entire tech industry
Speaker 1: should know who he is, the culture he's created, and
Speaker 1: the ways in which he's brutalized this company into finding
Speaker 1: ways to increase numbers, all at the cost of user happiness.
Speaker 1: And my anger is because there was a time that
Speaker 1: Facebook was useful. There was a time that Instagram is useful.
Speaker 1: There are friends and family that I've kept in touch
Speaker 1: with thanks to Facebook products, thanks to Instagram. There are
Speaker 1: things that these products have actually done for people that
Speaker 1: have made their lives better, and all of that is
Speaker 1: going away. All of it's being crushed by the rot economy,
Speaker 1: and it's King Mark Zuckerberg. There is no one who
Speaker 1: is more of a rot economist than Mark Zuckerberg. It's disgusting,
Speaker 1: it's unconscionable. It's also utterly pathetic. Mark Zuckerberg created probably
Speaker 1: one of no, I would say, within Facebook's history, at
Speaker 1: least three or four different products, the idea of news feeds,
Speaker 1: profile pages, these are all things that Facebook really popularized.
Speaker 1: Mark did something kind of incredible, as did the people
Speaker 1: under him, and then he just wanted more. He always
Speaker 1: wanted more. Mark zucker must have more. He must have
Speaker 1: more of Hawaii, he must have more of the Internet.
Speaker 1: But I will give you a funny side to this.
Speaker 1: Everything's kind of falling apart. In the next episode, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna show you how Mark Zuckerberg's disgusting attitude to running
Speaker 1: a company is genuinely destroying these products. I've shown you
Speaker 1: the harm he's perpetuated and the deliberate actions behind it.
Speaker 1: And in this next episode, I'm gonna show you how
Speaker 1: bad things have got and honestly that Facebook's hand a dang.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 1: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 1: is Matasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 1: and audio projects at Matasowski dot com, M A T
Speaker 1: T O. S O w Ski dot com. You can
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