Facebook Inc gradually realized that he is not only a platform, but also a content publisher, taking care of readers as well as the truth of the news.
注Wired magazine, a US technology media, recently published an in-depth article, in which it sorted out the story behind Facebook Inc's crisis in the past two years by interviewing 51 current and former employees of Facebook Inc.
Company CEO Zuckerberg and his employees found that as Facebook Inc grew, the social platform did not bring people together, but contributed to the division of society, shattering their technological optimism. Facebook Inc gradually realized that he is not only a platform, but also a content publisher, taking care of readers as well as the truth of the news. The article was originally published in Wired Magazine, translated by Sina Technology, and translated by the authors Xing Yun, Zhongtian, Qingfeng and Chen Xia. The following are the main contents of the article:
One day in February 2016, Mark Mark Zuckerberg sent a memo to all Facebook Inc employees to address some disturbing behavior within the company. In some places, someone crossed out the phrase "black Black Lives Matter" and replaced it with "all lives are All Lives Matter". Zuckerberg hopes this person will stop this kind of behavior.
Zuckerberg wrote in the memo: "when we say 'the life of black people is also fate', it doesn't mean that other people's lives are not important. We never have any rules on what can be written on the wall. But crossing out other people's words is different. It means that one person's words are more important than others' words. " Zuckerberg said he would investigate the matter.
During this period, racial and political issues are being discussed all over the United States. At the time, Donald Trump had just won in South Carolina and had the support of David David Duke. And Hillary Hilary Clinton just beat Bernie Sanders in Nevada. Within Facebook Inc, there is a society called Blacktivist, which has attracted a lot of people's attention because they often make eye-catching remarks, such as "America's economy and status in the world are based on forced immigration and torture."
So after Zuckerberg sent out the memo, one of Facebook Inc's named Benjamin Fearnow thought it was newsworthy, so he took a screenshot of the memo on his computer and sent it to his friend Michael Nu?ez. Nunez, an employee of the technology news site Gizmodo, immediately posted a news story about Zuckerberg's memo.
A week later, another thing happened to Ferno, and he thought Nunez would be interested as well. In another internal exchange, Facebook Inc invited employees to ask Zuckerberg questions at the plenary meeting, and the company hopes to solicit questions from employees and vote on which questions will be sent to Zuckerberg. One of the questions with the most votes was "what does Facebook Inc have to do to prevent Trump from becoming president of the United States in 2017?" Ferno took another picture, this time using his cell phone.
Ferno, who recently graduated from Columbia University School of Journalism, worked in the New York office when Facebook Inc was in charge of Trending Topics, the new Feed stream that users saw after opening Facebook Inc's app. The Feed stream is algorithmically generated, but needs to be reviewed by a team of 25 people with journalism backgrounds. When the word "Trump" becomes a hit, the team will use their journalistic expertise to judge and rank the importance of news and show users the most important one.
Facebook Inc has always touted himself as one of the enterprises with the highest employee satisfaction. However, Ferno's team is not very happy. First, they are contract workers, they are recruited by a company called BCforward, and then they are sent to Facebook Inc, and every day they are reminded that they are not part of Facebook Inc. Second, these young journalists knew from the beginning that their jobs would be replaced sooner or later. Technology companies have been trying to replace manpower with technology because they believe that technology can scale more than humans. Everyone on Ferno's team believes that Facebook Inc's algorithm will eventually become good enough to get rid of human auditors and run the whole project alone, and everyone on the team knows that they are just tools to train these algorithms. I will be abandoned sooner or later.
Ferno's second screenshot was a Thursday. On Friday, when he woke up, he found that there were about 30 video conference notifications on his mobile phone. Although it was his day off, he was still required to make a video call within 10 minutes. He then had a video conference with three other Facebook Inc employees, one of whom was Sonia Ahuza, the company's director of dispatching. The other side asked if Ferno had any contact with Nunez. Ferno denied the problem. Later, the other party said that she saw the record of messages between Ferno and Nunez on Gchat. Ferno thought Facebook Inc could not see the record on Gchat. So Ferno was fired, and he was advised to "turn off his laptop and never open it again."
On the same day, Ahuza talked to another employee of the trend Topics team, whose name was Ryan Villarreal (Ryan Villarreal). Villarreal said he had not taken a screenshot, let alone leaked the information to anyone. But because it liked the news and was friends with Nunez on Facebook Inc, the employee was also fired.
The departure of Ferno and Villarreal put the Trends team in the limelight, and Nunez did not give up working on the team. Soon after, he released another news, which said that Facebook Inc helped Trump take office. Then, in early May, he published another article in which he said he had interviewed another "trend topic" employee. The title of this article is "former Facebook Inc employees: we often suppress conservative news". The article accused Facebook Inc's "trend topic" team of being biased in choosing news, suppressing conservative news and preferring to release liberal news. Just a few hours later, the article was reprinted by several highly trafficked technology and political websites, including Drudge Report and Breitbart News.
This article spread like a virus in a short period of time, but this is only the beginning of the troubles of the "trend topic" team. In the next two years, Facebook Inc happened a series of things one after another, which plunged the company into an even greater disaster.
This article sorts out the troubles Facebook Inc has encountered in the past two years. We interviewed 51 current and former employees of Facebook Inc. Many of them did not give their real names, and their reasons for anonymity are understood by almost everyone, especially Ferno and Villarreal.
Although these people's stories are different, almost everyone feels the same way: as the company grows, the company and its CEO find that their platforms can be used for ulterior purposes in countless ways, and their technical optimism is slowly shattered.
In the matter mentioned earlier, Ferno played a complex but crucial role that history assigned to him. But like Facebook Inc's Franz Ferdinand (Franz Ferdinand), in fact, he is more like the unfortunate assassin of the young archduke, although he succeeded in achieving his goal, but was caught red-handed.
Facebook Inc's "absolute neutrality"
Facebook Inc's growth mode is by far the most incredible myth of the information age. The platform, which was born at Harvard University, was originally developed for college students; then it spread around the world. After a while, your Facebook Inc account became your account to log in to other services on the network. In some countries such as the Philippines, Facebook Inc is almost the entire Internet.
To a large extent, Facebook Inc's lightning growth rate is due to its use of a very simple but clever principle: human beings are social animals. However, the Internet is like a sewage pool, at the beginning of the period, people do not like to put their personal information and personal life on the Internet. As long as we solve this problem and make people accept sharing their developments on the Internet, Facebook Inc can achieve rocket-like growth. After users start to share their information, Facebook Inc can attract enough advertisers, and this platform has become the most important media technology at the beginning of the 21st century.
Although this idea sounds easy to understand, Facebook Inc still made a lot of efforts in the early days of his development. "Fast Breakthrough, get rid of the Old and establish the New (move fast and break things)" is not only a slogan, nor is it just a suggestion for developers. It is the basic philosophy of the company of Facebook Inc. With this idea, Facebook Inc has achieved enviable growth, and of course they have to sacrifice something for this growth, many of which are related to user privacy. In the face of competitors, Zuckerberg is really ready, as soon as he finds a competitor that may threaten his position, he will either buy it or put his competitor's head in the water.
In fact, it is the competition with competitors that makes Facebook Inc the dominant platform for us to discover and consume news. In 2012, the most exciting online news distribution social media was not Facebook Inc, but Twitter. A former Facebook Inc executive said: "Twitter was the biggest threat to Facebook Inc at that time." At that time, the manager made great contributions to many of Facebook Inc's decisions.
So Zuckerberg used his own trick, and when he found a strong competitor but couldn't buy it, he always did it: imitate the competitor and bring it down. By the end of 2013, traffic to Facebook Inc's news site had doubled, while traffic to Twitter began to decline. By mid-2015, Facebook Inc had surpassed Alphabet Inc-CL C to become the platform with the largest number of news websites, and the number of readers had reached 13 times that of Twitter. In the same year, Facebook Inc launched the Instant Article function, which allows news publishers to publish news directly on the platform. "if you could use the same functions as Twitter in Facebook Inc, would you still use Twitter?" the former manager said.
Facebook Inc has become the dominant force in the news industry, but they are obviously not ready. Everyone in the management understands the importance of news quality and accuracy, and they have also set up relevant rules, but after all, they are not a professional news organization. Facebook Inc himself does not have a reporter. They did not spend enough time on judging the quality of news, and soon they found themselves in trouble. What is fairness and justice? What is the truth? How to distinguish between news, analysis, satire and opinion? For a long time, Facebook Inc thought these things had nothing to do with them because they thought they were a technology company-all they provided was a platform on which all ideas could appear.
This idea has almost become an internal creed of Facebook Inc, and every Facebook Inc person thinks that their product is an open and neutral platform. Whenever new employees are hired, Chris Fox, the company's chief product officer, trains them, introducing them to new colleagues that Facebook Inc is a new communication platform for the 21st century, while the phone belongs to the 20th century. If anyone dared to challenge Fox's claim, he would have moved out of Chapter 230 of the Communication purification Act (Communications Decency Act), passed in 1996. The bill stipulates that Internet intermediate platforms are not responsible for the content posted by users.
So Facebook Inc established such a self-image: absolute neutrality. They seem to have no inclination at all. However, their so-called neutrality is in itself the result of a choice. For example, Facebook Inc decided to show everything on News Feed in exactly the same way, whether it's a picture of a neighbor's dog or breaking world news. Facebook Inc insists this is a sign of the democratization of information. What you see is what your friends want you to see, not the choice of an editor in Times Square. But in fact, Facebook Inc's practice is not much different from the editor's choice.
Facebook Inc adjusted for the first time
In February 2016, just as the "trend topic" disaster intensified, something strange was happening in the consciousness platform of Roger McNane (Facebook Inc's early investor). He was arguably one of the first people within Facebook Inc to discover the problem. Although he doesn't have much contact with Zuckerberg, McNane is still an investor in the company, and in the same month he found something to do with Bernie Bernie Sanders's campaign. "I found something spreading. They came from a Facebook Inc group that was related to the Sanders campaign, but they couldn't have come directly from the Sanders campaign," he recalled. They are well organized and spread in some way, suggesting that someone may have got the budget. And I thought, 'that's weird, it's a little bad.' "
But McNane didn't tell anyone at Facebook Inc, at least not at the time. Facebook Inc himself does not have any worries.
Facebook Inc has been criticized for influencing the election in a completely different way, and Facebook Inc was busy defending himself in the spring of 2016. In May, Gizmodo published an article about the political bias of "trending topics", which bombed Menlo Park. Soon millions of readers read the article, and ironically, it still appeared in the "trend topic". But it was not the media that really touched Facebook Inc, but a letter from John John Thune, a Republican senator from South Dakota, who wrote to Facebook Inc because of media reports. Chu Le hopes that Facebook Inc will explain the problem of "prejudice" and that they will respond quickly.
Chu Le's letter sounded the alarm. Facebook Inc quickly assigned senior Washington staff to meet with Chu Le's team. Facebook Inc then sent a 12-page letter (single-spaced) saying that the company had scrutinized "trend topics" and concluded that most of Gizmodo's reports were untrue.
In addition, Facebook Inc also made a decision to throw an olive branch to the entire American right, who were angry at the company's treachery. Just a week after the story spread, Facebook Inc invited 17 well-known Republicans to Menlo Park. There are TV hosts, radio stars, think tanks and even an adviser who advises the Trump campaign. Facebook Inc wants to listen to everyone's opinions, and one more important thing is that Facebook Inc wants to apologize for his "sin."
Facebook Inc, an employee who arranged the meeting, revealed that the idea of bringing a group of conservatives together and they would definitely fight each other was part of the plan.
Because of the power outage, the room was extremely hot and uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the meeting went on in an orderly manner as planned. Some people want Facebook Inc to set employment quotas for conservative employees, while others think it's a bad idea. As often happens, when outsiders talk to Facebook Inc, people always try their best to attract more followers for their pages.
Afterwards, Glenn Beck, the invitee, wrote an article about the meeting, praising Zuckerberg. "I asked Zuckerberg if Facebook Inc would stick to his faith and become an open platform for people to share ideas or become content managers now and in the future," Baker said. Zuckerberg did not hesitate. He replied in a clear and bold tone that there was only one Facebook Inc and there was only one way to go:'we are an open platform.'"
Within Facebook Inc, the issue of "trend topic" has also aroused some reflection. However, the intensity of reflection is not great. At this point, a secret internal project (code name Hudson) emerged to answer the question: should dynamic messages (News Feed) be modified to solve some of the complex problems facing the product? Does dynamic news prefer those infuriating posts? Does it prefer simple or even wrong things to complex and real content? At the end of June, Facebook Inc made modest adjustments: launching a new algorithm to emphasize posts related to friends and family. At the same time, Adam Adam Mosseri, Facebook Inc's director of dynamic information, issued a statement entitled "create better dynamic news for you". In the eyes of outsiders, this statement is purely a model draft. Its content is also easy to expect: oppose content that is attractive by title, and support content that does not favor particular views.
Murdoch's dissatisfaction
Shortly after Mosseli published an article about the values of dynamic news, Zuckerberg flew to Sun Valley, Iowa, to attend the annual conference hosted by billionaire Herb Allen. At a meeting held in Murdoch's villa, Murdoch expressed his dissatisfaction. A large number of conversations showed that Murdoch and News Corp. CEO Robert Thomas (Robert Thomson) explained to Zuckerberg that they had long been dissatisfied with Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc-CL C. If Facebook Inc refuses to strike a better deal with the publishing industry, News Corp executives will be more aggressive in condemning and lobbying harder. In Europe, they cause trouble for Alphabet Inc-CL C, and in the United States, they also make Facebook Inc sad.
A former Faebook executive believes that Zuckerberg has every reason to attach importance to the meeting because he has first-hand knowledge of how powerful Murdoch's "dark tactics" are. "Murdoch has always tried every means to make things difficult in the face of Facebook Inc," the executive said. "
After returning from Sun Valley, Zuckerberg told employees that things had to be adjusted. Facebook Inc had no news business at that time, but they had to ensure that there would be news business in the future and had to communicate in a better way. Everyone has new tasks, such as Andrew Anker (Andrew Anker), a product manager who joined Facebook Inc in 2015 and worked in journalism before that. Shortly after the Sun Valley meeting, Anker met with Zuckerberg, who wanted to recruit 60 new people to work with the news industry. His request was granted before the talks were over.
It's nice to recruit more people to communicate with publishers, but it doesn't solve the problem that Murdoch really wants to solve, namely financial problems. The news media spent a lot of money producing content, but Facebook Inc made a profit from the content, thinking that Facebook Inc gave too little in return.
Some media use paywalls to make money, such as Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, but Instant Articles forbids paywalls and Zuckerberg does not allow paywalls. How can paywalls make the world more open and connected? This is not in line with Zuckerberg's philosophy.
Generally speaking, such conversations often end in a stalemate, but at least Facebook Inc pays more attention to it.
Trump uses Facebook Inc to get to the top
Facebook Inc has been struggling to become a company that dominates the media, but doesn't want to be a media company. Trump campaign workers don't have this kind of confusion. For them, Facebook Inc is the most effective direct marketing political propaganda tool in history.
With the election campaign at its peak in the summer of 2016, the Trump digital campaign seems to be at a great disadvantage. Look at Hillary Clinton's team, there are many elites, even Eric Schmidt (Eric Schmidt) is her adviser, Schmidt used to be Alphabet Inc-CL C CEO. Trump's campaign is run by Brad Brad Parscale, who runs the website of the Eric Trump Foundation (Eric Trump Foundation). If you look at Trump's social media director, he is his former caddy. In 2016, facts proved to us that you don't need digital experience to participate in the presidential election, you just need to master Facebook Inc.
In the summer, the Trump team turned Facebook Inc into a major fund-raising platform. They upload voter files to Facebook Inc, and through the Look-alike Audiences tool, people can subscribe to Trump's newsletter and buy Trump campaign caps. In this way, the campaign can send ads to people with similar traits.
Trump's candidacy is also a useful weapon, and spammers use it to concoct a large number of viral and fake stories. Towards the end of the campaign, the number one fake story on the platform was more popular than the number one true story.
Some people abuse Facebook Inc, and now Facebook Inc users already know that they do not seriously distinguish between true and false, and sometimes the true and false are obvious. When something meaningless spreads around, there is a person who is watching, and that is Mike Nano. First false news came out to support Sanders, then there was support for Brexit, and finally someone helped Trump. Towards the end of the summer, McNane wanted to write a column about the problems with Facebook Inc's platform. But he didn't do it in the end. "my idea was simple," he said. "these people are my friends and I want to help them." One Saturday night, nine days before the 2016 election, McNane wrote an email of 1000 words to Sandberg and Zuckerberg. The letter begins by saying, "I am really disappointed in Facebook Inc." I was associated with the company more than 10 years ago, and then I was very proud and satisfied with the success of the company. But in the past few months, everything has changed. Now I am deeply disappointed, embarrassed and ashamed. "
Facebook Inc's second adjustment
It's not easy to realize that Zuckerberg wants to create a platform to bring people together, and Zuckerberg was initially reluctant to be honest about Trump's victory and Facebook Inc's role in it. Executives clearly remember the chaos of those days, with leaders going back and forth between Zuckerberg and Sandberg's offices, trying to figure out what just happened. At a meeting two days after the election, Zuckerberg said that the offline world of filter bubble is more harmful than Facebook Inc, and it is difficult for social media to influence voting. "on the Facebook Inc platform, the amount of false news is very small," he said. I think it's crazy for some people to say that these false news affected the election. "
When we were writing this article, we wanted to interview Zuckerberg, but he refused. People familiar with the matter say he likes to extract his views from the data. Before the meeting, Zuckerberg's employees made rough calculations, and the data showed that false news accounted for only a small part of Facebook Inc's campaign-related content. However, the analysis is very broad, it can only tell us the proportion of false news on the entire platform, does not represent influence, nor can it tell us how it affects specific groups. Numbers are just numbers and don't have much meaning.
Zuckerberg's remarks did not get much support, even within Facebook Inc. "his words are very hurtful, and I don't agree with him on this point," said a former Facebook Inc employee. We must change his mind. If we don't, our company, like Uber, will continue to follow the wrong path.
Just a week after Crazy talk, Zuckerberg flew to Peru to promote his idea to world leaders: getting more people online and connecting to Facebook Inc could reduce the number of people living in poverty around the world. As soon as he arrived in Lima, he admitted that he was wrong. He explained that Facebook Inc did attach great importance to misleading information, and he also listed seven plans to fix loopholes, but the plan was very vague.
At a secret meeting, Zuckerberg met with another person, a political veteran, Obama. Media reports say Obama pulled Zuckerberg aside to remind him to watch out for fake news. People familiar with the matter said the meeting was arranged by Zuckerberg and the schedule was only because he wanted Obama to believe that Facebook Inc attached great importance to the issue.
For the first time, insiders began to question whether Facebook Inc's power was too great.
Shortly after the election, the staff team began to prepare for the establishment of a "News Feed Integrity Task Force". A few weeks later, Facebook Inc announced that if users think a piece of news is false, Facebook Inc should provide a more convenient means for them to mark it.
In December, Facebook Inc announced that the facts would be checked. Of course, Facebook Inc will not check it himself, but will hand it over to a professional to check. If Facebook Inc receives enough signals to tell him that a story is false, the content will be automatically sent to partners for evaluation. In early January, Facebook Inc hired Campbell Brown, a former CNN celebrity, to join the company.
Soon, under Brown's leadership, Facebook Inc began to launch a project called "Facebook Inc Journalism Project". The general purpose is to tell the outside world that Facebook Inc attaches great importance to the future of journalism and wants to play his own role. Although the goal is touching, there is also a wave of anxiety behind it. Facebook Inc said: "after the election, because Trump won and the media focused on fake news, we were criticized." People are starting to panic that regulation will be tightened. So the team began to study Alphabet Inc-CL C to see what its News Lab had done in the past few years. We began to look for ways to integrate our projects and tell the outside world that we attach great importance to the future of news. "
Some leaders of Facebook Inc believe that this problem cannot be solved and perhaps it should not be solved at all. During the election, did Facebook Inc really make a bigger mistake than Fox News or MSNBC in magnifying anger? Anker believes that the problem is not Facebook Inc, but human beings themselves.
Public opinion backlash
Zuckerberg's claim that fake news influenced the outcome of the presidential election is "very crazy" has attracted a lot of attention, the most influential of which is a security researcher named Ren é e DiResta. For many years, she has been studying the way false information spreads on Facebook Inc platform. She was shocked by Zuckerberg's statement. "how can this platform say that?" She recalls.
At the same time, Roger McNane (Roger McNamee) was completely infuriated after receiving a reply from Facebook Inc. Although Zuckerberg and Sandberg replied to his letter immediately, there was little substance in the letter. He had months of fruitless email exchanges with Facebook Inc's vice president of partnership, Dan Rose. 'Ross 's reply was polite, but the tone was very firm: Facebook Inc has done a lot of excellent work that McNair can't see, 'Mr. McNane said.' anyway, Facebook Inc is a platform, not a media company.
"I sat there and said, 'guys, to be honest, I don't think it's the right thing to do,'" McNane recalled. "you can argue blushing that you are a platform, but if your users have a different point of view, then your statement doesn't make any sense."
As the saying goes, there is no anger from love to hate in heaven. McNane's worries soon became the beginning of a career and alliance. In April 2017, he appeared on Bloomberg Television with Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist of Alphabet Inc-CL C, and the relationship between the two men quickly warmed up. At that time, Harris had already won the national reputation of "Silicon Valley industry conscience". He has written about the subtle techniques used by social media companies to develop dependence on their services. "they can magnify the worst aspects of human nature," Harris said in an interview with Wired magazine in December. After an interview with Bloomberg Television, McNair said he called Harris and asked, "Dude, do you need a partner?"
The following month, Diersta published an article comparing false information providers on social media to speculative high-frequency traders in financial markets. "Social networks enable perpetrators to manipulate platforms on a large scale because they are designed for rapid information flow and viral transmission," she wrote. Robots and vests can create the illusion that they have a large number of grassroots fans in a cheap form, just as early illegal trading algorithms may give investors the illusion of demand for a stock. " Harris was so impressed by the article that he immediately wrote an email to Diersta.
Soon, the three men went out to "preach" and talk to anyone who was willing to listen to Facebook Inc's harmful influence on American democracy. Soon after, they found listeners in the media and Congress who were willing to accept his views-groups that were increasingly dissatisfied with what the social media giant was doing.
The relationship between Facebook Inc and the media is becoming increasingly tense.
Even at the best of times, a meeting between Facebook Inc and media executives would give the impression that it was a family gathering that broke up in discord. The two sides are closely linked, but they don't like each other very much.
In the eyes of Facebook Inc executives, lecturing people who can't tell algorithms from API is casting pearls before swine. In the darkest hour, they want to know what's the point of doing this? News accounts for only 5% of all content seen by global users on Facebook Inc. Facebook Inc can let it go, and shareholders will hardly notice. There is a deeper problem: according to people familiar with the matter, Mark Zuckerberg prefers to think about the future and is less interested in problems in the news industry; he is interested in problems five or two years later. On the other hand, editors at big media companies are worried about the next quarter-maybe even their next call.
When Campbell Brown started her new job in charge of Facebook Inc's new news project, this mutual vigilance-which almost turned to hatred after the US election-did not make her life easier. The first thing on her to-do list is another Facebook Inc "listening trip" with editors and publishers. One editor described a fairly common meeting: in late January 2017, Mr Brown and Chris Cox, chief product officer of Facebook Inc, invited a group of media executives for a meeting at Mr Brown's apartment in Manhattan.
Cox was a quiet, gentle-looking man, sometimes referred to as "Ryan Gosling of Facebook Inc products," but he bore the brunt of the subsequent conflict. "basically, a group of us explained to him how Facebook Inc destroyed journalism, and he gladly accepted it," the editor said. "he didn't do his best to defend himself. I think the important thing is that he shows up and seems to be listening. "
Despite many setbacks, Brown's team became more confident after Zuckerberg issued a 5700-word corporate manifesto in February, believing that their efforts were valued within Facebook Inc. "are we building the world we all want?" Zuckerberg raised this question at the beginning of the article, implying that the answer is clearly no. In his statement on "creating a global community", he stressed the need to keep people abreast of the latest situation and to crack down on fake news and click bait.
Shortly after the corporate manifesto, Zuckerberg embarked on a well-planned national "listening trip". Accompanied by a camera crew and a personal social media team, he began to walk into candy shops and restaurants in the "red states", states where voters tend to vote for Republicans. He also wrote a serious article about what he had learned and dodged the question that his real goal was to become president. It looks like an activity to win the support of friends for Facebook Inc. But it soon became clear that Facebook Inc's biggest problem came from farther away than Ohio.
Russian intervention
When writing the corporate manifesto, Zuckerberg doesn't seem to understand a lot of things, one of which is that his platform breeds far more complex enemies than Macedonian teenagers and low-rent housing companies. As 2017 faded away, the company began to realize that it had been attacked by foreign forces. "I want to really distinguish fake news from Russian stuff," said one Facebook Inc executive. "to the latter, everyone used to say,'Oh, my God, it's like the national security situation.'"
That moment did not come until more than six months after the start of the American election. Facebook Inc found no sign of a coordinated foreign publicity campaign, but the company didn't really want to look for such signs either.
In the spring of 2017, Facebook Inc's security team began preparing a report on how Russian and other foreign intelligence agencies use its platform. Alex Stamos (Alex Stamos), head of Facebook Inc's security team, was involved in drafting the report. According to two people familiar with the matter, he is eager to make a detailed and specific analysis of what the company has found. However, members of Facebook Inc's policy and public relations team were not satisfied with Stamos' practice and reduced the content of the report. According to people close to Facebook Inc's security team, the company did not want to be involved in the political storm at that time.
On April 27, 2017, the day after the US Senate announced that it had summoned FBI Director James Comey (James Comey) to testify against Russia, Stamos' report, entitled "Information manipulation and Facebook Inc", explained in detail how foreign adversaries used Facebook Inc to spread false news, but there were no specific examples or details, let alone direct mention of Russia. It makes people feel boring and cautious in the use of words.
A month later, an article in time magazine made Stamos's team realize that they may have missed something in the analysis. The article quoted a senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as saying that Russian agents had purchased advertisements on Facebook Inc to launch a large-scale publicity campaign aimed at Americans. At about the same time, Facebook Inc's security team also got some hints from congressional investigators that intelligence agencies were indeed investigating Russian advertisements bought from Facebook Inc. These messages caught members of the security team off guard, so they began to dig deep into Facebook Inc's archived advertising data.
Many security researchers were surprised that it took a long time for Facebook Inc to realize how Russian agents were using the platform. Executives said they were embarrassed that it took so long to find fake accounts, but also pointed out that they had never received help from US intelligence agencies.
When Facebook Inc finally found Russian propaganda on his platform, the incident triggered a crisis. First of all, due to miscalculation, Facebook Inc initially spread the news that Russian agents had spent millions of dollars on advertising, but the actual figure was six figures. Once that error is resolved, internal differences of opinion will be exposed on how much has been disclosed and who has been specifically targeted. Facebook Inc can release data on advertising to the public, everything to Congress, or nothing.
This debate is closely related to the issue of user privacy. Members of Facebook Inc's security team are concerned that even if the user's private data belongs to Russia's troll farm, the legal process involved in handing over the data will facilitate the government's forcible acquisition of Facebook Inc's other user data in the future.
Finally, a blog article signed Stamos surfaced in early September, saying that Russia had paid Facebook Inc a total of $100000 before and after the 2016 presidential election to buy about 3000 advertisements aimed at influencing US politics. Every sentence in the article seems to play down the essence of these latest revelations: there are only a small number of advertisements and not much spending.
Criticism from the government and former executives
For McNano, the way Russians use Facebook Inc is neither surprising nor surprising. "they found 100 to 1000 people who were angry and scared, and then used Facebook Inc's tools to advertise and get people to join different groups," he said. "this is precisely the purpose of Facebook Inc's design."
McNane and Harris went to Washington, D.C., for the first time in July to meet with members of Congress. Two months later, Diersta joined them and began to spend all his free time questioning senators, congressmen and their aides. McNane, Harris and Diresden are helping them prepare for the upcoming House and Senate Intelligence Committee hearings on how Russia can use social media to interfere with the US election.
At the time, one of the questions they weighed was who should be summoned to testify. Harris suggested subpoenaing CEO, a big technology company, to stand in a row in Congress and raise their right hand to take the oath, a dramatic scene similar to what tobacco executives were forced to do more than a decade ago. After discussion, they finally decided to summon the general counsel of Facebook Inc, Twitter and Alphabet Inc-CL C to attend the hearing.
So, on November 1st, Colin Strachey (Colin Stretch) rushed to Congress from Facebook Inc to attend the hearing. During the hearing, Diersta happened to be at home in San Francisco, sitting on the bed watching live with headphones on. Perhaps the most threatening statement came from Dianne Feinstein, a senior senator from the state where Facebook Inc is based. "you created these platforms, but now that they are abused, you have to take action," she declared. "otherwise, it's up to us to take action.
After the hearing, another dam appeared to collapse, and a number of former Facebook Inc executives began to publicly criticize the company. On Nov. 8, American billionaire and first president of Facebook Inc, Sean Sean Parker, said he regretted pushing Facebook Inc to the world. "I don't know if I really understand the consequences of what I'm saying," he said. "God only knows what effect it has on our children's brains."
Zuckerberg compromises with journalism
On the day of the hearing, Zuckerberg also had to attend Facebook Inc's third-quarter earnings conference call. Facebook Inc's financial figures are as good as ever, but he is not in a good mood. Typically, Zuckerberg says the company's business is going well, even if that's not the case. This time, however, he took a different approach.
"I have said before that I am very upset that the Russians are trying to use our tools to sow the seeds of mistrust," Zuckerberg said. We develop these tools to help people connect and bring us closer together. They use these methods to try to destroy our values. What they have done is wrong, and we will not tolerate such behavior. "
Zuckerberg also said that Facebook Inc would invest a lot of money in security, while Facebook Inc's income could be "significantly reduced" in the short term. "I want you to know what Facebook Inc's priority is: protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits." There are signs that Zuckerberg is beginning to accept criticism of Facebook Inc. The Facebook Inc News project, for example, seems to be making the company more serious about its obligations as a publisher, rather than just a platform.
That fall, Facebook Inc announced that Zuckerberg had decided that publishers using Facebook Inc's instant articles would need readers to subscribe. Before that, he had been opposed to this practice for many years. In the first few months of the US presidential election, paying for serious publications seemed to be both a way forward for journalism and a way to resist the political ecology of "post-truth".
A few weeks before Thanksgiving in 2017, Zuckerberg held an outdoor quarterly full-staff meeting on the Facebook Inc campus, known as Hacker Square. First of all, he wishes everyone a pleasant holiday. Then he said, "there has been some bad news this year and recently, and many of us may be asked, 'what happened to Facebook Inc?' It has been a difficult year, but I know that we are lucky to play an important role in the lives of billions of people. It's an honor, and it brings great responsibility to all of us. " According to one attendee, these comments are more depressing and personal than anything he has ever heard from Zuckerberg. He seems to be very modest, even a little learned. "I don't think he can sleep well at night. I think he's remorseful about what happened." The employee also said.
In the late autumn, criticism continued to spread: Facebook Inc was accused of being a central medium for spreading extreme remarks against the Rohingya in Myanmar and supporting Rodrigo Duterte's brutal leadership in the Philippines. In December, he received another heavy blow from his own people. In early December, after leaving Facebook Inc in 2011, Chamath Palihapitiya, a former vice president of user growth for Facebook Inc, told viewers at Stanford that he thought social media platforms like Facebook Inc had "created tools to destroy the social structure" and that he felt "huge guilt" about being one of them. He said he used Facebook Inc as little as possible and did not allow his children to use such a platform.
Meanwhile, Roger McNamee (Roger McNane) visited the company in the media. He published an article in the Washington monthly and was interviewed in the Washington Post and the Guardian. Facebook Inc is not very impressed with him. Executives think he exaggerated his relationship with the company. Andrew Bosworth, vice president and member of the management team, wrote publicly on Twitter: "I have worked at Facebook Inc for 12 years, and I have to ask: who the fuck is Roger McNair?
Although Zuckerberg does seem eager to fix the perception of the outside world. Around this time, Facebook Inc's senior team gathered at Grill, an upscale restaurant in Manhattan, to have dinner with News Corp. executives. Zuckerberg toasted Murdoch from the start. He said cheerfully that he had read the long biography and appreciated his achievements. Then he talked about his tennis match against Rupert Murdoch. At first, he said, he thought it was easy to play with a man who was more than 40 years older than him. But he soon realised that Mr Murdoch was there to compete with him.
Facebook Inc's latest adjustment
On January 4, 2018, Zuckerberg announced that he faced new personal challenges this year. In the past nine years, he has been committed to self-improvement. This year, his attitude is even harsher. "the world is anxious and divided, and Facebook Inc has a lot of work to do-whether it's protecting our community from abuse and hatred, against nation-state interference, or ensuring that the time spent on Facebook Inc is worth it." Zuckerberg announced. This sentence is not original-he borrowed it from Tristan Harris, but people around him can prove that he is completely sincere.
It turns out that the New year's challenge is a series of carefully considered and much publicized plans, and starting with next week's announcement, the news feed algorithm will be reactivated to support "meaningful interaction." Posts and videos that we look like but don't comment on or care about-will be given priority. The idea, Adam Mosseri explains, is that online, "interacting with people is positively related to many welfare measures, but less important to passively consuming content online."
For many in the company, the announcement marks a big change. Facebook Inc is reversing a car that has been moving at full speed in one direction for 14 years. From the beginning, Zuckerberg's ambition was to create another Internet or another world within Facebook Inc and get people to use it as much as possible. This business model is based on advertising, which is indisputable to people. But now Zuckerberg says he expects new changes in these news feeds to reduce people's use of Facebook Inc.
The news was attacked by many people in the media. During the launch, Mosseri explained that Facebook Inc will reduce the stories shared by companies, celebrities and publishers, and give priority to stories shared by friends and family. Critics speculate that these changes turn out to be nothing more than a provocation to the publishing industry. "Facebook Inc has basically said goodbye to the media industry," Franklin Fleur wrote in the Atlantic. "Facebook Inc will first degenerate to making us feel terrible about our bad holidays, our children's relative mediocrity, and teasing us to share more of our personal selves."
But within Facebook Inc, executives insist this is not out of reach. According to Anker, who retired from the company in December but made these changes and had a big impact on the management team, "it's wrong to see this as a retrogression in the news industry. This is a concession to "if it can work with our algorithm to promote participation". According to others who are still at the company, Zuckerberg doesn't want to back down from actual journalism. He sincerely hopes that the platform will reduce spam: fewer stories without content and fewer videos that don't make people think.
Then, a week after telling the world about "meaningful interactions," Zuckerberg announced another change, seemingly responding to those concerns after a heated discussion. For the first time in the company's history, he said in a note posted to his personal page that Facebook Inc would begin to strengthen publishers whose content was "trustworthy, informative and localized". Over the past year, Facebook Inc has been developing algorithms to crack down on publishers whose content is fake; now it is trying to improve what is good. For beginners, he explained that the company will use reader surveys to determine which sources are trustworthy. Critics are quick to point out that the system will definitely be gamified, and many will say that trust is simply because they know them. After the post rose, the share price of the New York Times rose like News Corp.
Zuckerberg hinted, and insiders have confirmed that we should look forward to more announcements in the year. The company is trying to give publishers more control over the paywall and allow them to display their logos more prominently to rebuild the brand logo launched by Facebook Inc years ago. Facebook Inc's old rival Rupert Murdoch made a hostile outside suggestion, saying in late January that if Facebook Inc really valued "trustworthy" publishers, it should pay them "handling fees".
However, the fate that Facebook Inc really cares about is its own. It is based on the power of the network effect: you join because everyone else has joined. However, the network effect is equally powerful in driving people off the platform. Zuckerberg understands this deeply. After all, he helped MySpace create these problems ten years ago, and it can be said that the same is true for Snap Inc today. Zuckerberg avoided this fate, in part because he has proved to be good at choosing his biggest threat. When social media began to be driven by pictures, he bought Instagram. When the fast delivery of the message began, he bought WhatsApp. When Snapchat became a threat, he copied it.
But people who know him say Zuckerberg has really been changed in the ordeal of the past few months. He was thoughtful; he realized what was going on; he really cared about his company to solve the problems around it. At the same time, he is also worried.
The past year has also changed Facebook Inc's basic understanding of whether it is a publisher or a platform. Companies have been provocatively answering this question for regulatory, financial and even emotional reasons-platforms, platforms. But now, Facebook Inc is gradually developing. Of course, this is a platform, and it will always be. But the company now realizes that it has taken on some of the responsibilities of publishers: taking care of readers and caring for the truth. If you separate the two, you can't make the world more open and connected. So what is it: a publisher or a platform? Facebook Inc seems to finally realize that it is obviously both.
(source: wired magazine, titanium media)