Facebook Files : Incompetence, Hubris, or Malice?
Hi All,
I hope you all are doing well and welcome to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on …
Apology : I apologize for being AWOL for the past few weeks. This is the longest break I have taken since starting this newsletter. Work has been crazy and I was out for a week at Berkeley-Haas taking their Product Management Leadership Program. Another first for me since covid - being in a room full of people (and taking a class with a mask!) Scary!
A couple of weeks ago, I had intended to write about Apple and IAP and the recent regulatory changes but decided that it's a bit late to write about IAP so I decided to write a bit about the “Facebook Files”. Great investigative journalism by WSJ and if you haven’t read the entire set and/or seen the documents I highly recommend it. There are (so far) 8 parts of the story covering a variety of topics:
Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt
This one is about Facebook having rules for “elites” and normal posters. The program “cross check” or “XCheck,” was intended as a quality-control measure for high-profile accounts
Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Many Teen Girls, Company Documents Show
This one is about Instagram and how the app affects millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls but did nothing
Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead.
This story is about Facebook’s 2018 algorithm changes to strengthen bonds between friends and family (ie less junk on your feed) but the changes made Facebook and its users angrier and suggested changes were not incorporated
This article talks about how Facebook employees flagged various things - drug and human trafficking, inciting violence, sellin organs, and several other things and how Facebook’s response was inadequate and at best lukewarm
How Facebook Hobbled Mark Zuckerberg’s Bid to Get America Vaccinated
This one is about vaccine misinformation and disinformation and how Facebook contributed to sowing doubt in people’s minds about the vaccine (oh and good luck if you use Facebook to get your news!)
Facebook’s Effort to Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show
This is about how Facebook was trying to bridge the gap in their product offering to engage pre-teens (11-13) and how they are an “untapped” audience. Typical market segmentation and they also put a hold on their Insta teens product recently
Facebook’s Documents About Instagram and Teens, Published
This article contains the set of documents that WSJ used in their research and also included ones that FB released annotated versions of these a few days ago but not all of them.
Is Sheryl Sandberg’s Power Shrinking? Ten Years of Facebook Data Offers Clues
This one is about WSJ reviewing 10 years of FB employee lists and shows which teams have expanded, which execs got more responsibility providing quite an interesting view on a company that has hitherto been closed too such scrutiny (and for GOOD reason)
I don’t know is WSJ has anymore of these explosives tucked away but yesterday before the 8th article was released Senators from the Senate’s consumer protection subcommittee grilled Antigone Davis (and quite well, if I may say so). Antigone Davis is Facebook’s Global Head of Safety and I have sympathy for her and her role (and I’m quite sure she is well compensated!)
While American Senators have gotten much smarter about their questions Sen. Richard Blumenthal’s question to Antigone Davis was TikTok fodder last night (TikTok link) . Senator Blumenthal asked about “Finsta” which essentially means “fake insta” or “friend insta” which is kind of a private instagram used for friends or close circles. This of course is used to avoid parental oversight and probably other nefarious teenage things. Antigone Davis was asked to is they plan to shut down the “Finsta service”. LOL. Ok on a serious note I think the intent behind the question was on point. How does Facebook plan to stop fake Instagram accounts from being created (which btw is a problem that every single platform or service faces)
I digress though, if only a bit. What I wanted to dig deeper into today was is Facebook just incompetent, or are they are just malicious or do they just have a lot of hubris.
Casey Newton wrote earlier this week that Facebook should release the Facebook Files and called it the biggest challenge since Cambridge Analytica in 2018. Well once they’re in someone’s hands they are gonna get released anyway so may as well release it themselves right? I mean would any company want their secrets and dirty laundry aired? Even so, Pratiti Raychoudhury, Vice President, Head of Research penned a blog post to try and explain the research and the results. Again, given the antagonism toward Facebook, that fell flat.
So why does Facebook have such issues and what should one think about Facebook? Facebook is a huge company with 60k+ employees. A large company by any standard and a lot of these initiatives and the resulting problems are to a certain extent decentralized with decisions on the most important topics being approved/vetted by Zuck himself.
Let’s dive into each of these…
XCheck Program
The program is meant to provide additional quality control around moderation when it comes to high-profile users, according to the WSJ. Posts from users flagged for XCheck are supposed to be routed to a set of better-trained moderators to ensure Facebook’s rules are properly enforced. But the program reportedly protected 5.8 million people as of 2020, and just 10 percent of posts that hit XCheck actually get reviewed
Wow! 5.8M people given that Facebook has closed to 3B users the number is not necessarily large. Facebook has to do this. They’ve had moderation policies and needless to say as a business they do need to function and avoid the bad press if they don’t moderate correctly. In this case Facebook could be more transparent about XCheck but again Xcheck is an internal company tool built to protect the company and their reputation. I chalk this down to hubris if anything and definitely not malice or incompetence.
Insta’s Toxicity
While I vehemently do not support the fact that Facebook purportedly did nothing about teens on Instagram, its not like they haven’t done anything. They have tried to make Instagram safer for their audiences. Any company has to invest in certain areas and its possible that the company decided to focus on safety as a higher priority. I’m not saying it's correct. Should Facebook have released this research? Maybe they could have spent some effort on additional research and increased priority. I chalk this down to hubris as well!
Facebook’s platform is “angrier”
Facebook likely had good intentions here but they backfired miserably. In this case Facebook was incompetent and also had a lot of hubris and instead of fixing the issues they let it slide even though they understood the impact. Changing this would mean a huge impact to their business and that is the likely reason
Facebook’s weak response to drug cartels and human traffickers
Granted that it's not possible to catch every single violation of the platform policies, making it easier to traffic humans or drugs by reducing transaction costs on the internet is a problem any platform would have. Facebook could have likely done a lot more here and I chalk this to incompetence. Facebook has a large number of moderators and they all work hard at blocking the worst possible content that could make Facebook an even bigger cesspool of all the worst that humanity has to offer. I don’t think this is any of malice, incompetence or hubris but the fact that the company should hire more moderators and if they do the content to sort through only goes up. Facebook uses a ton of AI to catch the most offensive content but humans being humans find loopholes making this a never ending game of whack-a-mole.The only way to solve is it to change the business model thereby killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Hobbling Vaccination efforts
I mean seriously! This should have been a bit easier to block right (and I use the word easy compared to everything else). I, of course, do not know the complexity of blocking such content but the company should have made this the first priority – even over earning engagement and $ since this impacts all of humanity!
Targeting pre-teens
Kids these days are native technologists from pretty much the day they are born and maybe the approach was incorrect but what Facebook was trying to do was to make a product as a bridge product since they were losing a lot of teenagers who find that the platform is for old and boring people (it is!). That being said, Facebook is a business and they were pursuing a business strategy v/s anything else. People don’t like that of course and now it's a huge brouhaha. Tainted reputation. Are we really saying that there are no companies targeting kids with their products and services?
Facebook, needless to say, has its work cut out for them going forward but some of the WSJ press was sensationalism. I mean just look at the headline for each of the articles. Facebook might be operating within the confines of the law but the end result is if people don’t like your reputation as a company people will stop using your products. The issue here is that the trio of Facebook, Insta, and WhatsApp are a monopoly (even if that is harder to prove) and the only thing to right the ship is regulation made for the internet and social media age. My biggest fear though is for a company the size of Facebook what else do we not know and how does that impact us? I fear we’ve dug a hole and by using these products more and more we’ve just dug ourselves deeper. This is what the internet business models come down to – advertising. It's a choice we as a people have made and we need to start digging our way out. It's truly the Internet’s original sin.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well! If you enjoyed reading this please consider sharing with a friend or two (or sign up here if you came across this or were forwarded this)
