Better Offline - How Mark Zuckerberg Deliberately Made Facebook Worse

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

In the last decade, Mark Zuckerberg and his internal growth team have repeatedly and intentionally made Facebook and Instagram harder and more dangerous to use in the pursuit of perpetual growth, and in this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through multiple horrifying insider stories about Facebook's disgusting approach to user happiness. LINK for documents: https://www.wheresyoured.at/killingfacebook/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face.

I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin and I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now.

You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AllZone Media. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zittron. Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as much as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for like catching up with your friends and family and seeing things

from bands you might like, and now pretty much algorithmic nightmares, and they interrupt you constantly with suggested content and advertisements that far outweigh the stuff you. you actually logged onto the platform to see. Conversely, those running Facebook groups or pages routinely find that their content isn't even being shown to people that follow them. And that's all thanks to Meta's basically abusive approach to social media. The customer is not only always wrong, but they ideally will have little to no control over the things that they see on the platform that you monetize them on.

It's all very frustrating. And in the next two episodes, I'm going to walk you through the client. of these platforms, in particular Facebook, and meta, of course, as a company. And I'm going to start today with the events that led to its decay, and those I believe are responsible for turning the world's most popular consumer apps into Skinnerbox or advertising agencies. In this episode, I want to frame Facebook's decline around two specific features, people you may know, which is an innocent yet kind of horrible feature that really explains itself, and the newsfeed, which is the central hub of information on the platform,

one that's become so algorithmically charged that it's far more about what Facebook wants to show you than any conscious action by a user. And it's my belief that these products piloted by the deeply insidious people led by Mark Zuckerberg himself are central to the darkness that has enveloped this company. But I want to be clear, none of this is really new. It's a common trope that, oh, well, Facebook went down. heal because they went public, which is partially true, don't get me wrong, but I really want to be clear that the rot began early. Facebook has always been a rotten manipulative company, and they've

always acted with very little regard for their users, even at times when they pretended to do so. The goal's always been more, not just more money, but more engagement, more time on app, more visits to the website, perpetual growth, all mandated by Mark Zuckerberg himself. and a rogue's gallery of rot economist arseholes. But as ever, I need to give you a little history lesson, so we need to go back in time. We start our story in 2004, a few months after the company was founded, when Peter Thiel became Facebook's first investor, and he put $500,000 into the company and got an astonishing 10.2% stake.

As you might have seen in 2010s the social network by Aaron Sorkin, Teal was introduced to Zuckerberg by Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster, and if you're a little younger than I am, that was a website you used to use to illegally download music. And he was fresh from a beat down by Loisorik and Metallica, who, again, if you're younger than me, much younger, I guess, they sued Sean Parker, who was running Napster, which was basically imagine if Spotify was just stealing everything. Anyway, they sued him, he had to shut down the website, made him very sad. But what was significant about this event when Sean Parker introduced Teal to Mark Zuckerberg, Wasn't really the people involved or the amount of money, but the terms of the deal,

terms that would permanently and inextricably ruin Facebook forever. Parker, ever the advocate for founders, he negotiated with Peter Thiel to allow Mark Zuckerberg to retain two of Facebook's five board seats. When Parker resigned in 2005, he insisted that Mark Zuckerberg be given his seat. Just to be clear, that's three out of five board seats for one guy. unilateral power. While this may have seemed noble, and maybe even ideal for a founder in these early days, this single move has allowed Mark Zuckerberg to wield complete power over Facebook,

which I know is now called Meta, and it was the first step along a road that made him completely impossible to fire, which is doomed to this company, to this endless, miserable death march. All thanks to Harvard's most quirked up white boy, Mark Zuckerberg, I really cannot express how important this moment was. This was when the mistake was made, albeit innocently, to keep Zuckerberg in power. I'd be kind and suggest that Sean Parker didn't know what Zuckerberg was like at this point other than the fact that he absolutely did and he should have known better.

Well, maybe it's more about Sean Parker just selecting people poorly. I guess we'll never know. A few years later in April 2006, Zuckerberg was once again able to negotiate terms that kept him at the top, in part thanks to Facebook's pretty strong revenue for the time, $6 million a year in revenue, pretty impressive for a social network especially. And at the time, by the way, it's very early days. And the fact that he owned three out of the five board seats and could do whatever the hell he wanted allowed him to pretty much dictate the terms.

Venture capitalists were desperate to avoid missing out on this company, had rocket ship growth, and at the time, MySpace was actually a very successful business. and thus what were they going to do? Try and negotiate with the Petty King? Absolutely not. They needed that cash. In September 2006, Facebook would launch the news feed, a relatively unsophisticated chronological feed of your friend's statuses,

that is, on some level, kind of one of the most important launches in software history. And it's a great example of a good product that got completely bulldozed by executives that don't really care about their users and want to just use advertising and algorithms. them to torture them. The feed, which Facebook product manager, Rudy Sangivi, described as quite unlike anything you can find on the web, led to an immediate revolt within Facebook's 9.5 million users at the time, as it effectively showed a stream of literally every action you took on the platform, which users found, and I quote, creepy and stalker-esque, according to a group, made at the time called Students Against Facebook News Feed. For those who weren't around when it

launched or didn't use Facebook, which I don't blame, for, this is all kind of hard to grasp. It would show you literally every activity you and your friends did. If you joined or left a group or made a new connection, everyone could see it. It was almost like a penopticon, except you were both the jailer and the prisoner somehow. A few days later, Zuckerberg would apologize, saying that Facebook, and I quote, really mess this one up, and that Facebook spent two days coding nonstop to add a special privacy page allowed users to choose which types of stories went into the feed. While this feature was actually released,

it's important to know that the rest of the world might not have known what you were doing afterwards, but Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook absolutely did. This was the same year that Facebook opened to the general public. It previously been just for college students, then for certain organizations, they think then they had high schoolers, but then they opened up to everyone.

And they also turned down a billion-dollar acquisition offer from Yahoo and signed a three-year advertising deal with Microsoft. Ah, Yahoo in 2006. Who was what Prabhakaram? Anyway, moving on. Yet Facebook's rot really began in earnest in 2008, when a former McKinsey analyst, yes! Now the vice president of global online sales and operations at Google

will be made chief operating officer. Her name was Cheryl Sandberg, and she'd be the force that would grow Facebook into one of the most evil companies alive. guest from some SNL late night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group.

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard Yardt Yard's, right? Do you have a name suggestion? We're open? Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Huber me.

I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart.

Streaming, radio. and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Hey everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the Podmeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor. So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show.

I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Like what was just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay

to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, ooh, ha, ha, ooh, ha, ha, oh. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune in a pod meets twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to PodMeets Tworld on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now that I've given you the basic history and the basic terms here, you've got Mark Zuckerberg, completely in power, cannot be fired, never will be fired.

And then you've got a C.O, chief operating officer, Cheryl Sandberg, former McKinsey analyst, chief of staff under Larry Summers' Department of Treasury. A real management consultant brain is in here, and it's only going to get worse. According to an excerpt from Stephen Levy's Facebook, The Inside Story, sometime in 2008, Facebook's growth had stalled somewhere around 90 million users, with Zuckerberg telling Levy in an interview that his company had hit a wall. Shamath Paliopatia, a former venture capitalist who was at the time Facebook's VP of platform and monetization, came to Mark Zuckerberg with an idea. The Facebook should focus on a new metric, monthly active users.

This metric, which is now a cornerstone of most tech companies' growth metrics, would be a measure of whether users were actually sticking around on the platform and boosting this number, would mean that users were coming to Facebook and they were staying. Please remember this metric. It's going to be important in the second episode, and even more important right now. In a meeting with Zuckerberg and Sandberg, Shamath was asked to name it, and he came up with the term MAUs. Sandberg responded that they should just call it growth. At the next board meeting, Shamarth would present what Levy would call aggressive growth techniques that would double or even triple Facebook's user base and then use the platform itself as an engine for growth. After a tepid response at the meeting, Shamath was given license to build a new growth team from both within and outside of Facebook, one that would eventually become pretty much the most evil super team in tech,

like the Avengers of assholes, including Facebook head of product Naomi Gleit and Alex Schultz, who would go on to become META's chief marketing officer and VP of Analytics, along with fellow teammate Javier Olivan, who replaced Sandberg as chief operating officer in 2022. All of these people now, by the way, have senior roles at the company. I want you to remember that throughout this story. Gleit, Ollivan and Schultz are at the epicenter of almost every single choice that Metter has made to put growth above the user experience. Shamath wanted their team, which also included early Facebook data scientist Danny Ferranti

and Blake Ross, who previously co-created the Firefox web browser, to become, and I quote, the growth circle. What Levy refers to as a power center in the company with special status and distinctive subcultures. Not great. But he succeeded. Shamath succeeded. In 2008, Facebook would launch a feature called People, People, you may know, a seemingly innocent feature that would, as the name suggests, suggest people

that you might know on Facebook. Yet this feature seemed a little too good at its job, with reporter Kashmir Hill, who spent over a year investigating the feature for Gizmodo between 2016 and 2017, Hill said that it mined information users didn't have control over to make connections that they might not actually want to make, such as suggesting patients find their psychiatrist or outing a sex worker's real name to her clients. Despite doggedly researching people you may know, he'll never really got Facebook to explain how it works. Nevertheless, Stephen Levy was able to get Shamath to reveal one horrifying detail.

The Facebook's growth team would take out Google ads on people's names, targeting those who hadn't joined Facebook with something called a dark profile, a fake link that would suggest that somebody was already using your name on Facebook, conning you into going to the site. This is absolutely goddamn disgraceful. It's insane to me that more people don't know about this and more people aren't angrier. And by the way, you're wondering how they found out who the Facebook holdouts were? You wondering where that came from? Well, it's because they would happily ingest your entire contact list,

allowing them to see which friends were on there and which weren't, using that data. And you may think, Ed, you jump into bloody conclusions. You just put in words in their mouth, incorrect. Now the CTO of Facebook guy called Boz, Andrew Bosworth, and I'll get to him later, he's already said, quite literally, that that feature was justifiable. But we continue. While many might consider people you may know as a well-meaning feature, indeed a useful one for a social network,

the algorithm behind the service is powerful and sinister, and it's capable of dragging up these distant relationships honed in by both the data you give Facebook and other shadowy sources that we may never know. I do, however, believe there's another person responsible. A man named Lars Backstrom, a relatively unknown yet extremely powerful figure in Facebook's history. Backstrom's LinkedIn notes that he built PYMK, people you may know, and he built its back-end infrastructure and machine learning system, starting from September 2009 through February

2012. In 2013, and this is nasty, by the way, Baxtern published a paper in tandem with a computer scientist called John Kleinberg, and it was called Romantic Partnerships and the dispersion of social ties, a network analysis of relationship status on Facebook. Try saying that fast twice. It's actually very difficult. This paper focuses on an algorithm that was able to independently identify someone's spouse. According to the time Stephen Law, 60% of the time, and it was even capable of predicting when someone would break up with someone else. The paper hinged on the idea that mutual friends isn't really an indicator of a couple's relationship status, but rather the dispersion of those mutual friends, the amount of mutual

friends that are also mutual friends with each other. This is a sensible idea that when framed as an algorithm made by an engineer who made Facebook's extremely successful growth tool, feels a lot more creepy. Backstrom, in a 2010 talk relayed again by Stephen Levy, said that people you may know accounted for a significant chunk of all friending on Facebook and that friends of friends are the most powerful part of the tool. People you may know's power wasn't just that it found people that you knew well, but people that you kind of saw and you offering you the tantalizing idea of proximity to them and when you friended them, Facebook's news feed would automatically make their content more prevalent, forcing a kind of intimacy that may not

have actually existed by making a new connection, even if it was super tangential. And the feed made it feel more immediate, giving Facebook more power over you and also actively manipulating you, and this isn't even the half of it. This subtle feature is responsible for much of Facebook's growth, and it was deliberately engineered by raw economists like Schultz, Gleit and Oliver to do so at any cost, even if it endangered the lives of children. And by the way, I'm not being dramatic. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2018,

David Erb, an engineer in charge of one of Facebook's community integrity teams, found that, and I quote, the most frequent way adults found children to prey upon was using people you may know. The journal also reported that a few days later, Erb found that Meta was planning to add encryption to the Facebook messenger system on the platform, something that would prevent the company from fixing this problem, and he threatened to resign in process. Now you'd think at this point that the company would go,

yeah, that sounds dangerous, so I probably don't want to... No, no, no. They placed him on administrative leave, and then he eventually resigned. Facebook, by the way, did introduce encryption to its messages, despite Erb's stark warning, and this is a quote, that millions of paedophiles were targeting tens of millions of children. People you may know was and is a dangerous tool, and it was created and maintained and proliferated by people that now effectively run meta. Schultz is the CMO.

Bosworth is the CTO. Olivan is the C-O-O-O-O-Glite is a head of product. And from what I've been told by sources, pretty much the Darth Vader to Mark Zuckerberg's emperor. And if you've not watched Star Wars, just Google it. I'm not going to help you there. Once Palliopecia left Facebook in 2011 to start a venture capital firm, his team, Schultz, Glit and Olivand, they continued to accumulate power. And as I've mentioned, I believe these people, along with Lars Backstrom, are responsible for making

people you may know into this reckless, dangerous, scurrilous growth tool for a company that doesn't really seem to give a shit about its users. But we continue, because they're not done rotting yet. In January 2012, that's when it really would set him, with the launch of sponsored stories in Facebook's newsfeed, which Josh Constine, allegedly a journalist at the time, claimed he would rather inform him about the activity of friends than traditional ads that can be much less relevant, a statement that frames exactly how little the tech media criticised this company. Makes me feel crazy. He also added one interesting tidbit that Facebook attested letting advertisers pay,

for sponsored content in the newsfeed in 2006, but discontinued doing so in 2008, because they decided that advertisers shouldn't be able to show content in the news feed unless it could appear there naturally a statement that Constee wrote without a single hint of alarm. Isn't that funny, though? It is really funny that half of these companies, they've said at some point, nah, we'll never build the torment nexus. Then a decade later, they're like, yep, we've got the torment nexus going, fellas, it looks great, it's making us billions. Anyway, in February 2012, Lars Backstrom, as mentioned, the architect of people you may know, would move over to manage Facebook's newsfeed rankings.

And then a few months later, Facebook would acquire Instagram for a billion dollars, possibly one of the best acquisitions in history, at least were a company. In May 2012, Facebook would have what would be considered a disastrous IPO, with Wall Street concerned about its lack of growth on mobile devices. After its first day of trading, the share price was barely, over its debut and by September it had shared more than half of its value. Something had to change, and sometime in 2012, Facebook would find one man, one man who could fix these problems. They promote a product manager called Adam Messeri to the head of Facebook's news feed division.

It was during this period when it started recommending content into your feed. In Mark Zuckerberg's statement of intent to potential investors in Facebook's IPO, a standard letter that you'll see in pretty much every run-up to a public offering, he declared that there was a huge need and huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected. Or what I like to know is phase one of Facebook's decline. Behind the curtain, Zuckerberg's vision wasn't to, by the way, get everyone connected in the world or anything like that. He wanted to connect everyone in the world to Facebook, and by the end of 2012, the site had a billion users, or about a seventh of humanity. He also made one very weird statement in this letter.

He said that Facebook didn't build services to make money, but they made money to build services. And as I'll shortly reveal, he was completely lying. Look, I'm on a level with you. For over a decade, Facebook has deliberately made itself worse to make more money, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg and his growth team, perpetuating a culture that manipulates and tortures users to make. number go up. It really is that simple. While reporting this, I genuinely had to check with

multiple people just to make sure I hadn't accidentally written a rot economy fan fiction piece. This shit is completely bonkers. And also a lot of it's public. How's no one put... Anyway, in a 2016 memo leaked to BuzzFeed several years ago, then Vice President, Andrew Boz Bosworth, now Facebook's chief technology officer, wrote a horrifying screed. It's a real stomach turner, and it romanticized Facebook's growth at all cost culture. Boz, what a name, know if that connecting people on Facebook, and these are quotes by the way, may cost a life by exposing someone to bullies, and that, and again, I quote, maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated using Facebook's tools,

but that because Facebook's mission was to connect people, all the work that Facebook does in growth is justified. Bos makes it clear that this is a moral judgment by adding that, and again I quote, all questionable contact importing practices, such as the one by the way that I mentioned with people you may know, all the subtle language that helps people stay searchable to their friends, which again refers to terms and conditions, and all the work that Facebook does to bring more communication in was justified in the pursuit of growth. This man, this horrible, nasty man, is the chief technology of, officer of Meta. And he's the mastermind, by the way, behind both Meta's Metaverse and their

artificial intelligence goals. This is the guy. This is the guy. Anyway, as I'll explain, and as you can probably kind of work out right now, Facebook is culturally a rot economy company. It is, at its core, a growth at all costs enterprise. And they will make any changes they need to, to make their products make a number go up. And it can be as simple as revenue, or it can be a completely made up number that they made just to make Mark Zuckerberg happy. In December 2020,

a Facebook engineer published a document that they wrote in 2019 called When User Engagement Doesn't Equal User Value, shared with me by a source that assures me that these documents are available through Harvard. This remarkable document is a stark warning, one posted internally at the company. and it's warning them that Facebook's brutal focus on user engagement and I quote time spent on the app

damages the user experience. And the person in question, they explain it through the context of cable TV versus broadcast TV and how cable TV needs to maximize its value for their fixed fee options. And that broadcast TV needs to maximize people watching shows intently because one makes money off of a subscription and one makes money off of advertisement, which means people need to really watch it. In the case of broadcast TV and what the engineer was getting at when they were talking about this, was that this sometimes leads broadcast television to do some nasty things, some kind of anti-user things,

by having constant recaps, padding scenes with flashbacks, adding cliffhangers, giving people a reason to keep watching that isn't just the show's good. But I'm going to continue here. The engineer then goes on to explain several ways that Facebook has deliberately made its products worse to maximize engagement. He lists that Facebook deliberately limited the amount of information and notifications to make people come to the site to increase engagement,

as people had to keep checking to see what was happening and couldn't rely on notifications for, well, not know, notifying them about stuff? The engineering question referred to this as a clear value engagement trade-off. Facebook also deliberately stopped sending out emails telling people what happened on their feed so that they would have to visit the site.

Facebook would also, by maximizing time spent on the site, incentivize a kind of bad ranking. I imagine because when you're incentivizing things to keep people on the site, you're not actually trying to show them the things they want. You're trying to get in the way of it. One other note is Facebook's algorithm kept prioritizing headlines that said misleading things and subtly exaggerated things to get people to click links. And the engineering question says it did this all the time. and the solution to deal with it, again quoting, was very crude.

To be clear, all of these things were deliberate actions by Facebook. Facebook could have more information in notifications, and indeed they used to. Facebook could get rid of click-baity stuff like this, but doing that would bring the numbers down and that just isn't going to make Mark Zuckerberg happy. This piece was a dire warning to Facebook's internal staff, and it includes numerous really worrying warnings about what the company is doing to keep people engage, and it's layered with evidence from news and academia. The engineer warns that higher Facebook use is correlated to worse psychological states,

that an experiment found that a month-long break from Facebook improved self-reported well-being in people. They found that a large fraction of Facebook users struggled with their Facebook and Instagram use, and that a significant minority of users, about 3.1% of them at the time, reported serious problems with sleep, work or relationships that they attributed directly to Facebook and concerns or preoccupations with how they use the website. Underneath these warnings, the engineer gave some suggested solutions, and they noted that over the last couple of years, Facebook's newsfeed is slowly switched from maximizing time spent towards maximizing sessions,

meaning that Facebook had now changed to focus less on how long a user was on the platform, and more towards how many times they visited, which the engineer noted was a strong predictor of problematic use. This document, again, just to be clear, written in 2019, published in 2020, it really frames how Craven Facebook was about twisting its users' habits and how intimately aware the company was of these problems. One commenter on the piece added, in a larger thought about addiction, that they personally worried that driving sessions incentivized Facebook to make its products more addictive without providing much more value. And that, my friends, is exactly what Facebook has become.

A gratuitous social experiment where the customer is manipulated to make a number go up. And for over a decade, as I have said, Facebook has knowingly and repeatedly taken these steps to maximize activities on the website at the direct cost of the user experience. And they've made countless tweaks to the product to increase internal metrics, metrics obsessed over by Mark Zuckerberg, Alex Schultz, and Javier Oloven. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends, me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk, to David Letterman, help make you funnier.

This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriters, Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group. The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart.

Streaming, radio, and podcast. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Hey, everyone, it's Ryder Strong and Will Ferdell from PodMeets World. And now the Podmeets Twirled podcast. We're two men who were completely clueless to reality TV, who now have covered Dancing with the Stars, traitors, and we're gearing up for the season finale of Survivor.

So yeah, now we're experts. I know we annoyed a lot of our listeners by our severe lack of survivor knowledge. That is the point of the show. I'm just going to remind you. I have watched some Survivor. I obviously haven't watched enough. Did people not like it? Yeah.

Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion in the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, ooh, ha, ooh, ha, again, we are experts.

So make sure to tune at a Pod Meets Twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Pod Meets Twirled on the IHeard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In another document from October 2020 provided to me by the same source, an engineer explained why the Facebook app took on sessions as a top line metric in 2019.

This piece posted on an internal channel centered around Facebook's app strategy of building and, I quote, socially powered services that were focused on, and I quote again, the possibilities of what people could do with Facebook, largely because Facebook has no easy way to measure how it's satisfied news and needs. And by the way, that last part is a quote. This document's important because it reveals some very, very specific details about the company, such as that in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg unilaterally decided that time spent on Facebook was a top-level engagement goal and forced it upon the news team, despite their protest that it was too easy to game. Now, you may think, too easy to game, right? That's referring to exterior actors, surely, right? There's

just some people who would manipulate the feed. No, no, no, no, no. When someone at Facebook says something is too easy to game, it means that they're warning that people at Facebook will build products specifically to game the system to hit those metrics, even if it means making them worse, such as, in the case of time spent on the app, making the product more convoluted to use, meaning that people use the app more because it takes more effort to do the thing you want to. Hey, this kind of reminds me of something. When Propagall Ragavan led a coup to take over Google search from Ben Gomes, mentioned this a few episodes ago, his specific obsession was with queries or how many searches people

made on Google. Mark Zuckerberg is effectively doing the same thing here, demanding in 2014, as I mentioned, that Facebook increased two specific metrics, daily active people and time spent on the app. And he was looking for a perpetual increase. 10% year over year. It didn't matter if these things made the product worse or didn't actually show that their users were happy or enjoying the website or found it useful. All that matters was the number went up. But I continue. The document notes that in 2017 engagement metrics started to take a dive, but the company's focus on time spent meant that nobody actually noticed because

the number that Mark Zuckerberg cared about was going up. until the alarm was sounded by some internal engineers and then Facebook moved to the concept of sessions. To be clear, time spent always stuck around, but it was no longer the prize pig that must be fattened up. In this document, they discuss a term called meaningful interactions, which is the underlying metric which allegedly guides Facebook today. In January 2018, Adam Messeri, then head of news feed, would post an update about the feed, claiming it would now prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people, which may explain both the chaos and the rot in the news feed thereafter. And to be clear, you've really got to think about that.

Got to think about what he meant with that. Prioritized posts to spark conversations and meaningful interactions. Sounds like engagement bait to me, and if you've used Facebook any time in the last few years, I don't think you're going to disagree. As I've said, metrics around time spent hung around this company like a stinky, fart, especially with regard to video, and Facebook has repeatedly and intentionally made changes to manipulate its users to satisfy these metrics. In his book, Broken Code, Jeff Horwitz notes that Facebook changed its newsfeed design to encourage people to click on the reshare button

or follow a page when they viewed a post, with engineers altering the Facebook algorithm to increase how often users saw content reshared from people they didn't know. Which, by the way, think about that for a second. They changed the algorithm to make your feed more full of stuff that was not people you knew, just strangers. It's just so annoying. Horwitz also notes that Facebook began hunting for, and I quote, friction, anything that was slowing users down or limiting their activity,

with the goal of eliminating it. Something that manifested in Facebook allowing users to create an unlimited amount of pages and cross-posts the same material to multiple groups at once, and even a change to people you may know that priority, recommended accounts that were likely to accept a friend request. Naturally, this led to negative incentives, and in an internal document from 2018 called the Friending 1% Inequality in Friending, an unnamed internal Facebook worker noted that Facebook's aggressive optimization to make people send friend requests had created a weird

situation where 0.5% of Facebook accounts were responsible for 50% of friend requests. Worst still, accounts that were less than 15 days old now made up 20% of all outgoing friend requests, and more than half of friend requests were sent by somebody who was making more than 50 of them a day, heavily suggesting that Facebook was basically growing its platform by allowing spammers to spam. It's astonishing how stupid this company is, or maybe they're quite brilliant if you just think of them as a deeply evil and manipulative software company built to grow metrics and revenues. in which case they're amazing. In a later document published in mid-2019, another engineer proposes limiting the amount of

invites that Facebook users can send to groups, specifically noting that, and I quote, a larger proportion of invites into bad groups come from a small subset of whale invaders that sent out massive amounts of invites in a small amount of time, specifically noting that this effect was really helping vaccine misinformation groups, which posed, and I quote, an integrity and product relevant risk to the company. A few years ago, Mark Zuckerberg begrudgingly established some limits on invites. It's not really clear what they are, though. For Facebook and Meta at large, anything that might get in the way of growth is kind of a no-no.

Sometime in 2020, another document I've reviewed through the same source proposed limiting the distribution, as in the recommendation of groups, before they've proven to be trustworthy. So give you an example here, the idea would be that if a group came up that was outwardly racist or anti-vags or, I don't know, a January 6th-style group, just throwing that out there, you would want to stop them from being recommended to others so they don't grow and do something bad. Like, I don't know, visit Washington, D.C. The problem, as the unnamed engineer describes, is that, and I quote, unproven movements were able to get traction on Facebook way before community standards could review them. Some of them were gaining millions of followers in a single day, and that the groups had immediately began to violate community standards. And yeah, by the way, if you're thinking that this ends with me saying,

and then Facebook realized this was a problem and they changed something, you're wrong. They did nothing. Facebook never put any limitation. They never did. I'm sure that they're going to claim they have, but it's bollocks. In broken code, Horwitz notes that, quote, even when the safety benefits were high and the business risks were low, Facebook would choose not to use its emergency break the glass playbooks to take

action, which, by the way, were there emergency things that allowed them to quickly make groups have to review every post and various other measures. And even when Facebook used these measures, it was very quick to roll them back. Horowitz gives an example of the run-up to Myanmar's 2020 election, when the company rolled out the break-the-glass measures, limiting the spread of reshared content and replacing it with content from users' friends. These countermeasures were quite successful, and they produced an impressive 25% reduction in viral inflammatory posts and a 49% reduction in viral hoax photos. And it only cost them about 2% of meaningful social interactions, which was Facebook's and is Facebook's most favorite metric. Hulwitz then notes that

despite the small change in engagement and the internal team chose to roll these changes back a few months later. Can't stop that number going up. But I got a worse story. This one, this one really turns my stomach. One particularly horrible story, and it really pisses me off, is one of something called Project Daisy, which was a pilot program that would remove likes from Instagram in an attempt to reduce the anxiety and negative feelings that teenagers felt using the app. And this idea, by the way, it was retired after Adam Masseri, who is now the head of Instagram, claimed it had a, and I quote, very little impact and the result was neutral, relegating it to a Fiji I have to opt into. Yet a complaint filed by several US states, including California,

New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania in May 2023, quoted a meta researcher saying that Project Daisy, so turning off visible likes on Instagram, was one of the clearest things supported by research that meta could do to positively impact social comparison and well-being on Instagram. And they advocated for shipping it. With another researcher, saying that Daisy is such a rare case where a product intervention can improve well-being for almost everyone that uses META's products. Chillingly, one META employee said that if META refused to implement Daisy despite the research, they were doubtful that META would implement any broad product changes with the purpose of

improving user well-being. I think we can all agree they were correct. That story just, it's so disgusting. Because usually with these big tech companies, They do something horrible and you kind of have to work backwards. You're like, okay, so they probably did it for this reason. This was something where Adam Messeri, utter scumbag, lied. He lied so that Facebook could make, so that Facebook could hand wave away,

not doing something that would help many people, including millions of children. And then lied. And it's just disgraceful. These people have names. These people's names need to be attached with the word scumbag and liar. It's so disgusting. Anyway, the suit in question is labyrinthine, and it specifically makes one allegation aligns with the current state of both of Facebook and Instagram.

And I quote, that Meta's algorithm alters users' experience on the platform and draws unwitting users into rabbit holes of algorithmically curated material. And as I've mentioned before, the people involved from the very beginning are those perpetuating this abuse of users. An email thread from late 2017 and early 2018 cited on page 54 of the aforementioned complaint is one between Adam Messera and other executives discussing significant declines in US engagement metrics, naming how reducing notifications was associated with reduced engagement, with an unnamed employee stating that there would be a trade-off between making a better notification experience for users

and recovering flailing numbers in Facebook's daily active people metric. In the same thread, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said that if the team believed that a filtered notification experience was better, they shouldn't make changes because a metric was down, adding that Mehta needed to get better at making the harder decisions when the main decision criteria was choosing the customer experience over a particular metric. The then-VP of Analytics, now Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz, responded that he fundamentally believed that META abused the notifications channel. as a company. Though the suit doesn't quote the rest of the thread, it notes that the director of growth, Andrew Bocking, ended the discussion by saying that Meta would prioritize engagement over reducing notifications and that he just got clear input from Naomi Gleit that US Daily Active People is a bigger concern for Mark Zuckerberg right now than user experience. Look, when I wrote about Prabhakar Raghavans' destruction of Google search, it was a lot

harder to find real, tangible proof of his actions, that one could easily chart a path of intent in how he wanted to increase queries and revenue in Google search at any cost, even if it meant making changes to make it worse. But in Metus case, it's just so much easier. Mark Zuckerberg is personally responsible for the state of Facebook and Instagram today, and he's assembled this Marvel super team of growth fiends that will, at times happily and times begrudgingly, the user experience worse to increase engagement. And it isn't even a new phenomenon. From the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has acted without remorse. He's tricked, he's schemed, he's screwed over others, and it's all in pursuit of dominance and financial gain and growth, and it's absolutely

goddamn disgusting. Yet Zuckerberg could not do these things. He could not perpetuate these disgusting acts without the help of people like Chief Marketing Officer Alex Schultz. who saw to it that meta shut down crowdtangle, a public inside tool from meta that allowed researchers to easily analyze what was happening on the platform. Jeff Horwitz notes in broken code that Facebook, led by Schultz, killed crowdtangle because reporter Kevin Ruse kept posting a list of Facebook's most engaged with content, and that Facebook was dominated with right-wing assholes and lunacy and misinformation, like the movie Plandemic, an obvious COVID-conspiracy film that Joel Kaplan, head of Met as Public

policy team and a former Googler, by the way, initially blocked the health team from removing until Roos reported that it was Facebook's number one post. Just to be abundantly goddamn clear, the head of public policy at Facebook deliberately allowed the spread of COVID conspiracies and would have continued to do so if a reporter had not used a Facebook tool to show them how popular the post was. And the result, by the way? They killed the tool that allowed Kevin Ruse to find out that this happened. Thanks, Alex.

Every single terrible thing you see on Facebook, be it some sort of insane right-winged-free or a confusing, annoying product decision, every single thing has been done and pushed in pursuit of growth. Every bit of damage that matters caused to the world has been either an act of ignorance or an act of deliberate harm, and many times tweaking the product to make it harder or more annoying to use so that you'll log on to Facebook or Instagram multiple times a day and spend as much time on the app as possible. This should also explain why both Instagram and Facebook are just so terrible to use. Meta's company culture is one of sycivancy and user abuse,

and both of these apps are deliberately engineered to get in the way of what you want to do as a means of increasing your engagement, even if that engagement is one, because the thing you're engaging with is actively fighting you. And the rot begins at the top, and all of these horrifying, infuriating, disgusting, stomach-changing choices have been perpetuated by Mark Zuckerberg and his enforcer Naomi Glite,

making demands of engineers desperate to appease the almighty Zuck, having to, and I quote Horwitz, be careful not to frame decisions in terms of right and wrong, because, God damn, we wouldn't want Mark Zuckerberg having a fucking conscience. All right, let me calm down for a second, sorry. But this really is the petty king of the tech industry, a multi-billionaire that can never be fired that has billions of people on websites that he's deliberately made worse to boost engagement, rather than provide any kind of service for a company that makes billions and billions and billions of dollars.

You can probably hear how frustrated I am with this company, and I apologize if I've gone a little bit off the deep end. But Mark Zuckerberg is a goddamn scumbag. And he hurts his users for profit. The entire tech industry should know who he is, the culture he's created, and the ways in which he's brutalized this company into finding ways to increase numbers all at the cost of user happiness. And my anger is because there was a time that Facebook was useful. There was a time that Instagram was useful. There are friends and family that I've kept in touch with thanks to Facebook products, thanks to Instagram. There are things that these products have actually done for people that have made their lives better.

And all of that is going away. All of it's being crushed by the rot economy. And it's king, Mark Zuckerberg. There is no one who is more of a rot economist than Mark Zuckerberg. It's disgusting. It's unconscionable. It's also utterly pathetic. Mark Zuckerberg created probably one of,

oh, I would say within Facebook's history, at least three or four different products, the idea of newsfeed's profile pages. These are all things that Facebook really popularized. Mark did something kind of incredible, as did the people under him. And then he just wanted more. He always wanted more. Mark Zuckerberg must have more.

He must have more of Hawaii. He must have more of the internet. But I will give you a funny side to this. Everything's kind of falling apart. In the next episode, I'm going to show you how Mark Zuckerberg's disgusting attitudes running a company is genuinely destroying these products. I've shown you the harm he's perpetuated and the deliberate actions behind him. And in this next episode, I'm going to show you how bad things have got.

And honestly, that Facebook's kind of dying. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattersowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattisowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-K-I.com. You can email me at EZ at Better Offline.com or visit Better Offline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter.

I also really recommend you go to chat. Where's YourEd.at to visit the Discord and go to R-slash Better Offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, CoolzoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.

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