Connoisseurs of corporate cant have a new collector’s item: Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Epistle to his Disciples. “We built Facebook,” it begins, “to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us. That’s why we’ve always put friends and family at the core of the experience. Research shows that strengthening our relationships improves our wellbeing and happiness.”
Quite so. But all is not well, it seems. “Recently,” continues Zuck, sorrowfully, “we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content – posts from businesses, brands and media – is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”
Well, well. How did this happen? Simple: it turns out that “video and other public content have exploded on Facebook in the past couple of years. Since there’s more public content than posts from your friends and family, the balance of what’s in news feed has shifted away from the most important thing Facebook can do – help us connect with each other.”
Note the impersonality of all this. Somehow, this pestilential content has “exploded” on Facebook. Which is odd, is it not, given that nothing appears in a user’s news feed that isn’t decided by Facebook? What was actually going on, of course, was that the company’s algorithms explicitly selected the aforesaid objectionable content and displayed it, in order to ensure the continued growth of Facebook’s advertising revenues. The company’s annual results are due at the end of this month and will doubtless demonstrate the astonishing profitability of polluting the news feed in this way.
But – hark! – Zuckerberg has seen the error of his ways. He has apparently been doing research which “shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our wellbeing. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long-term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos – even if they’re entertaining or informative – may not be as good.” Accordingly, Facebook is going to change its algorithms so that instead of “focusing on helping you find relevant content” they will henceforth be concerned with “helping you have more meaningful social interactions”.
At this point, readers of a charitable disposition may be tempted to reach for the gospel according to Luke, chapter 15, verse 10: “Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repents.” Newspaper columnists, however, are neither paid, nor disposed, to be charitable, so let us examine Zuckerberg’s Pauline conversion with a less sympathetic eye.
What has happened is that Facebook’s boss has concluded that allowing publishers of news – both pukka and bogus – on to Facebook is more trouble than it is worth. Or, as Frederic Filloux, an astute observer of these matters, puts it in his blog: “For Facebook, journalism has been a pain in the neck from day one. Now, bogged down with the insoluble problems of fake news and bad PR, it’s clear that Facebook will gradually pull the plug on news. Publishers should stop whining and move on.”
En passant it’s worth noting that it’s not that long ago since publishers convinced themselves that Facebook was the future. The company lured them by dangling tantalising baubles – the news feed, instant articles and Facebook live, to name just three – before their wondering eyes. And they went for them like PG Wodehouse’s ostriches went for brass doorknobs (which is to say, swallowing them whole). Ordinarily sober media outfits were seduced by the promise of “a deluge of eyeballs” (Filloux again) and some invested heavily in dedicated teams to promote their presence on Facebook. All of which only goes to show that there’s a sucker born every minute. What these schmucks learned was that the returns on those investments were mostly minuscule; and now they discover that Zuckerberg viewed them all along much as Lenin regarded western communist sympathisers – useful idiots.
Facebook’s pivot towards “friends and family” is a pragmatic tactic to take the political heat off social media. Zuckerberg and his corporate peers are tired of being hectored by congressional committees and accused of being Russian stooges. It could also be strategically astute, if it turns out to be true that users are actually more “engaged” with holiday snaps and so on, because increasing monetisable engagement is essential to the company’s future profitability.
The more time people waste on the site the better it is for Facebook. But since the company’s business model remains exactly the same, it remains vulnerable to the kind of abuses that have caused the pivot in the first place. In the end, it’s just an advertising company pretending to be a social service, and no amount of corporate cant can disguise that awkward fact.
John Naughton is professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University. He is the author of From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet.