Narrative: Facebook's Power
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Mark Zuckerberg Pens a Personal and Facebook Manifesto (Feb 16, 2017)
Mark Zuckerberg has posted a combination personal and Facebook manifesto to the site, and has also been speaking to a variety of reporters about it over the last day or so. The manifesto is long and covers a ton of ground, some of it about the state of the world but much of it at least indirectly and often quite directly about Facebook and its role in such a world. In some ways, this builds on comments Zuckerberg made at the F8 developer conference last year, and it mostly stays at a similar high level, talking about grand ideas and issues at the 30,000 foot level rather than naming particular politicians or being more specific. To the extent that Zuckerberg is talking about how to use Facebook as a force for good in the world, this is admirable at least to a point. He clearly now both recognizes and is willing to admit to a greater extent than previously the role Facebook has played in some of the negative trends (and I believe this piece contains his first proactive use of the phrase “fake news”), and wants to help fix them, though much of his commentary on what’s going wrong spreads the blame more broadly. I’m also a little concerned that, although many of the problems Facebook creates stem from the service’s massive and increasing power over our lives, the solutions he proposes mostly seem to be about increasing Facebook’s power rather than finding ways to limit it. To some extent, that’s natural given who he is, but it suggests an ongoing unwillingness to recognize the increasing mediation of our world by big forces like Facebook and Google and the negative impact that can have. Still, it’s good to see more open communication on issues like this from a major tech leader – I’d love to see more of this kind of thing (as I wrote last summer in this piece).
via Facebook
Facebook wants you to apply for your next job on Facebook – USA Today (Feb 16, 2017)
Facebook has one of the biggest global audiences – perhaps the biggest – of any technology company, and it seems constantly tempted to try to leverage that audience for more things, with the next on the list recruiting services a la LinkedIn. I’m hugely skeptical about this – it’s one thing to know that a potential employer might scour social media accounts, but quite another to serve up your personal account directly in the application. I just don’t think most applicants want their Facebook profile to be front and center in their job hunting. In addition, even in the unlikely event Facebook were to match LinkedIn’s scale in this business, that’s a half-billion-a-quarter business, or about a tenth of Facebook’s current revenues. In other words, this is unlikely to take off, and even if it does, it won’t make a huge difference to Facebook’s business.
via USA Today
Facebook Tries to Offer Music Labels a YouTube Alternative – Bloomberg (Feb 13, 2017)
Billboard reported at the end of December that Facebook was working on a Content ID-like system for policing music rights infringement on the site, and this Bloomberg piece suggests more of the same. There are several challenges here. Firstly, most Facebook video is published privately, so it’s impossible for outsiders to truly gauge the scale of infringing content. Secondly, a lot of the music videos shared on Facebook are covers, not originals, making detection tough. And third, though Facebook wants to set itself up as a more attractive alternative to YouTube, with advertising as its business model it’s unlikely to pay out at a much higher rate, and in fact may detract from the progress being made by paid streaming services in compensating artists more adequately by creating yet another massive source of free music listening. As such, I’m not convinced that the labels should jump too quickly into bed with Facebook. And that’s tough for Facebook because it clearly wants to take share from YouTube, but music is a huge component of the latter’s popularity.
via Bloomberg
Facebook (FB) hires MTV executive Mina Lefevre to help it develop TV shows — Quartz (Feb 9, 2017)
Facebook has to this point been focused entirely on making it easy to share and enjoy content created by others, whether that’s its nearly 2 billion users, news organizations, TV stations, or others. To the extent that Facebook has tried to begin hosting some content, that content has still been created by other entities, even if it now lives on Facebook in either its native video platform or Facebook Instant Articles. However, it looks like that might start changing soon, with this hire from MTV. Lefevre doesn’t specify in her Facebook post what exactly she’s going to be working on, but does say she’s going to help build “Facebook’s original content”, and given her past expertise in TV, it seems reasonable to assume video will be a focus. There’s obviously a broader trend of platforms owning more of their own content, from HBO to Netflix and Amazon to Apple and so on, but this is new for Facebook. I’m very curious what the focus will be here – there are so many possible directions Facebook could go in with original video, though scripted dramas a la Netflix seem like a poor fit.
via Quartz (Lefevre’s FB post here)
Google and Facebook to help French newsrooms combat ‘fake news’ ahead of presidential election – VentureBeat (Feb 6, 2017)
If only these companies had made such a concerted effort to combat fake news in the US a year ago rather than only really springing into action in the very late stages of last year’s presidential campaign (and in Facebook’s case, mostly after it was over). It appears both companies are taking their duty to put accuracy above ad revenue a bit more seriously in France than they did in the US, a sign of increased realism about the power that each company has in shaping the news people see.
via VentureBeat
This Is What Facebook’s Filter Bubble Actually Looks Like – BuzzFeed (Feb 3, 2017)
The topic of fake news and the related topic of filter bubbles has been one BuzzFeed has been particularly strong on in recent months (abuse on Twitter is another). This analysis is fascinating, and shows how even the experience of watching video on Facebook can be colored by the outlets a user chooses to follow. This isn’t quite the same as Facebook’s algorithms showing users different things – in this experiment, the user consciously chose to watch either a Fox News or Fusion live video stream. But it’s a great illustration of how users on Facebook can have completely different experiences even when engaging with the same underlying content.
via BuzzFeed
Facebook Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2016 Results (Feb 1, 2017)
Facebook is surely one of the most predictable tech companies in reporting massive growth and profitability at the moment, and today’s results were no exception. The same drivers that have powered growth were there again in Q4: massive growth in US & Canada ARPU (up 46% year on year), massive growth in users (MAUs up 17% or 269m), increasing ad load and ad prices globally, and ads in new places like Instagram Stories and Messenger. Facebook has even been driving desktop ad revenue again, despite a decline in underlying usage – it was up 22% thanks to better mitigation of ad blockers. The only tiny dark cloud is that this is all ad growth – Facebook’s revenue is absolutely dominated by ads, which were 98% of its revenue in Q4. Non-ad revenue continues to decline, despite its investments in Oculus and other new areas, and will do so throughout 2017 too. If you believe in long-term challenges around ad-based business models, whether for privacy reasons, hitting a ceiling, the perverse incentives they create for businesses that use them, or something else, that could be a problem, especially as Facebook has already said its ad growth will slow in 2017 due to saturating ad load. However, I’m still very bullish on Facebook overall, especially as I think there are lots of untapped markets, not least showing people more content that doesn’t come from their friends, especially video (which was mentioned by Zuckerberg on the call today).
via Facebook
Continuing Our Updates to Trending – Facebook (Jan 25, 2017)
It’s a big day for Facebook news – I’ve already covered the new Facebook Stories feature and ads in Messenger, both of which are being tested. This is the only one that’s been publicly announced by Facebook, however, and it concerns Trending Topics, which appear on the desktop site. The changes are subtle but important – each topic will now come with a headline and a base URL such as foxnews.com, topics will be identified based on broad engagement by multiple publications and not just one, and the same topics will be shown to everyone in the same region rather than personalized. Though Facebook doesn’t explicitly say so (perhaps because it fears a backlash, perhaps because it would be a further acknowledgement of a thorny issue), but all of these can be seen as partial solutions to the fake news issue. Citing specific headlines and publications allows users to see the source and make a judgment about whether it’s a reliable one, prioritizing broad engagement will surface those stories that are widely covered rather than being promoted by a single biased source, and showing the same topics to all users could be seen as an attempt to break through the filter bubble. These all seem like smart changes, assuming Facebook can deliver better on these promises than some of its abortive previous changes to Trending Topics.
via Facebook (more on Techmeme)
DCN report shows publisher revenue from Google, Facebook, Snapchat – Business Insider (Jan 24, 2017)
This article (and the report it’s based on) frustratingly focuses on average numbers across a range of very different publishers, rather than providing something more detailed, which limits the usefulness of the data, but there’s some interesting stuff in here regardless. For one, this reinforces the sense that publishers are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to supporting the major new content platforms – on the one hand, they feel they can’t afford to be absent, and on the other systems like Facebook Instant Articles and Google’s AMP don’t seem to allow them to monetize as they do on their own sites. One surprising finding is how strongly Snapchat shows here relative to its overall share of ad revenue. The picture is muddied by the fact that the report covers both video and news content, and so YouTube makes a very strong showing overall too. The key takeaway for me is that these companies continue to tread a difficult and dangerous path as they work with these platforms, ceding a lot of control to them and potentially seeing less revenue as a result.
Update: the actual report is now available here in full.
via Business Insider
How Facebook actually isolates us – CNN (Jan 23, 2017)
This isn’t a new idea – it’s been around at least since Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble was published in 2012. But this study dives a little deeper and provides a scientific foundation for the claims made. However, it also demonstrates how much of the filtering and bubble behavior on sites like Facebook is really tapping into deeper human tendencies like confirmation bias, of which content shared through the mechanism of a social network is a massive enabler. Though the article doesn’t mention Facebook once beyond the headline, the study itself was focused on Facebook, so these findings are specifically about that specific network, though the patterns would largely apply to others too. Because so many of these features are grounded in fundamental human behaviors, they’re very tough to change too, so although Facebook may share some blame for enabling rather than challenging those tendencies, it’s going to be very tough to change them unless Facebook makes a very deliberate attempt to break up the filter bubbles and actively challenge users with new information that contradicts their existing views, which seems very unlikely.
via How Facebook actually isolates us – CNN