Facebook and Zuckerberg: Move over, Freud! Roll over, Plato!
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did a bit of a public relations blitz last week in response to the cascading privacy crisis at the company. I’m not sure there’s been a bigger supporter of Zuckerberg as CEO since I made Facebook one of my three largest positions back when it was around $20 a share. We’ve made a lot of money betting on Zuckerberg and Facebook but that doesn’t mean we should just continue to blindly bet on it. Here’s an in depth interview that Zuckerberg did with Ezra Klein on Vox. I’ve pulled out some of the key quotes that I think are noteworthy and I’ve added some Revolution Investing commentary around each one.
Klein did a great job of pushing Zuckerberg and not throwing him softballs. And he’s right that Facebook’s credibility has been hit over the last few years because they have continually tried to downplay their issues…
Ezra Klein
One thing that has been damaging for Facebook over the past year is a concern will arise and initially the answer is, “Very, very few people saw fake news.” Or, “Very, very few people saw anything from Russia-related bots.” And then slowly it comes out, “No, actually it was more. Millions. Maybe hundreds of millions.”
The problem wasn’t the lack of transparency; it was how to know we could trust what was coming out. And one of the reasons I’m interested to hear you broach the idea of independent institutions is I wonder if part of transparency has to be creating modes of information that are independent.
Mark Zuckerberg
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And I certainly think what you’re saying is a fair criticism. It’s tough to be transparent when we don’t first have a full understanding of where the state of some of the systems [is]. In 2016, we were behind having an understanding and operational excellence on preventing things like misinformation, Russian interference. And you can bet that’s a huge focus for us going forward.
Right now in the company, I think we have about 14,000 people working on security and community operations and review, just to make sure that we can really nail down some of those issues that we had in 2016.
After the 2016 US elections, a number of months later, there were the French elections. And for that, we spent a bunch of time developing new AI tools to find the kind of fake accounts spreading misinformation and we took down — I think it was more than 30,000 accounts, and I think the reports out of France were that people felt like that was a much cleaner election on social media.
A few months later, there were the German elections. And there, we augmented the playbook again to work directly with the election commission in Germany. If you work with the government in a country, they’ll really actually have a fuller understanding of what is going on and what are all the issues that we would need to focus on.
And then fast-forward to last year, 2017, and the special election in Alabama. We deployed a number of new tools that we’d developed to find fake accounts who were trying to spread false news, and we got them off before a lot of the discussion around the election. And again, I think we felt a lot better about the result there.
Cody here again. Is Zuckerberg serious that he thinks his “14,000 people working on security and community operations and review” is his answer to this question? My first boss on Wall Street, Andrew Lanyi, used to yell at us, “What business are we in? We are in the results business! I don’t care how many messages you left or how many times you sent an email. Results is all that matters.” The number of people working on the problem isn’t helpful. Results is the only thing that matters to Facebook’s community and regulators.
Later, Ezra makes a great point about how Facebook’s new focus on “trusted” news sources means that the bloggers and start up news companies will get punished…
Ezra Klein
I’m somebody who came up as a blogger and had a lot of love for the idea of the open internet and the way the gates were falling down. One thing I hear when I listen to the third solution there is it also creates a huge return to incumbency.
If you’re the New York Times and you’ve been around for a long time and you’re well-known, people trust you. If you’re somebody who wants to begin a media organization two months from now, people don’t know if they can trust you yet. If Facebook is the way people get their news, and the way Facebook ranks its News Feed is by privileging news people already trust, it’s going to be a lot harder for new organizations to break through.
Mark Zuckerberg
That’s an important point that we spend a lot of time thinking about. One of the great things about the internet and the services we’re trying to build, you’re giving everyone a voice. That’s so deep in our mission. We definitely think about that in all the changes that we’re making.
I think it’s important to keep in mind that of all the strategies that I just laid out, they’re made up of many different actions, which each have relatively subtle effects. So the broadly trusted shift that I just mentioned, it changes how much something might be seen by, I don’t know, just call it in the range of maybe 20 percent.
What we’re really trying to do is make it so that the content that people see is actually really meaningful to them. And one of the things I think we often get criticized for is, and incorrectly in this case, is people say, “Hey, you’re just ranking the system based on what people like and click on.”
That’s actually not true. We moved past that many years back. There was this issue with clickbait, where there were a bunch of publications that would push content into Facebook, [and] people would click on them because they had sensational titles but then would not feel good about having read that content. So that was one of the first times that those basic metrics around clicks, likes, and comments on the content really stopped working to help us show the most meaningful content.
The way that this works today, broadly, is we have panels of hundreds or thousands of people who come in and we show them all the content that their friends and pages who they follow have shared. And we ask them to rank it, and basically say, “What were the most meaningful things that you wish were at the top of feed?”
And then we try to design algorithms that just map to what people are actually telling us is meaningful to them. Not what they click on, not what is going to make us the most revenue, but what people actually find meaningful and valuable. So when we’re making shifts — like the broadly trusted shift — the reason why we’re doing that is because it actually maps to what people are telling us they want at a deep level.
Cody here again. Zuckerberg didn’t actually answer the question again, did he?
Ezra Klein
One of the things that has been coming up a lot in the conversation is whether the business model of monetizing user attention is what is letting in a lot of these problems. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, gave an interview the other day and he was asked what he would do if he was in your shoes. He said, “I wouldn’t be in this situation,” and argued that Apple sells products to users, it doesn’t sell users to advertisers, and so it’s a sounder business model that doesn’t open itself to these problems.
Do you think part of the problem here is the business model where attention ends up dominating above all else, and so anything that can engage has powerful value within the ecosystem?
Mark Zuckerberg
You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.
That doesn’t mean that we’re not primarily focused on serving people. I think probably to the dissatisfaction of our sales team here, I make all of our decisions based on what’s going to matter to our community and focus much less on the advertising side of the business.
But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford.
Cody here again. Do you guys remember when I wrote this a few months ago:
“The biggest difference between Apple and Google on that regard, Apple is also about the silo and trying to control you and things like that; Google is too. However, Apple is, first and foremost, a hardware business. They make their money selling you these gadgets that I’m talking on and typing on. Google, on the other hand, is a data company; a search company; an advertising company. And as the great George Gilder said recently at the money show, advertising is a business model that’s built on something that people hate. Nobody wants to be advertised to. It’s a form of propaganda; it’s just corporate propaganda, right? ‘Buy this product.’ It’s trying to make you aware of those products, yes, and that’s great I guess. But the vast majority of us don’t want advertising in our lives. So, investing in companies like Google and Facebook that are building their businesses around something that nobody wants is sort of a counter-intuitive thought. And, it’s probably something that we need to address at some point. The comeuppance might be coming for these companies who are built around siloing information.”
That’s exactly what’s happening to Facebook here and to a lesser extent, Google, right now, isn’t it?
Okay, here’s the most out of touch, incredibly presumptuous, arrogant and almost god-complex statement I’ve heard since Zuckerberg thought it was cool that he promoted his Oculus Virtual Reality technology by touring Puerto Rico after it’d just been hit by a hurricane…
Mark Zuckerberg
In the last year, we’ve done a lot of research into what drives well-being for people. And what uses of social networks are correlated with happiness and long-term measures of health and all the measures of well-being that you’d expect, and what areas are not as positive.
And the thing we’ve found is that you can break Facebook and social media use into two categories. One is where people are connecting and building relationships, even if it’s subtle, even if it’s just I post a photo and someone I haven’t talked to in a while comments. That person is reminding me that they care about me.
The other part of the use is basically content consumption. So that’s watching videos, reading news, passively consuming content in a way where you’re not actually interacting with anyone or building a relationship. And what we find is that the things that are about interacting with people and building relationships end up being correlated with all of the measures of long-term well-being that you’d expect, whereas the things that are primarily just about content consumption, even if they’re informative or entertaining and people say they like them, are not as correlated with long-term measures of well-being.
In the last year, we’ve done a lot of research into what drives well-being for people. And what uses of social networks are correlated with happiness and long-term measures of health and all the measures of well-being that you’d expect, and what areas are not as positive.
And the thing we’ve found is that you can break Facebook and social media use into two categories. One is where people are connecting and building relationships, even if it’s subtle, even if it’s just I post a photo and someone I haven’t talked to in a while comments. That person is reminding me that they care about me.
The other part of the use is basically content consumption. So that’s watching videos, reading news, passively consuming content in a way where you’re not actually interacting with anyone or building a relationship. And what we find is that the things that are about interacting with people and building relationships end up being correlated with all of the measures of long-term well-being that you’d expect, whereas the things that are primarily just about content consumption, even if they’re informative or entertaining and people say they like them, are not as correlated with long-term measures of well-being.
Cody here. Wait, what? Did he just try to explain to us that based on their research they know what “drives well-being for people.” Now the definition of “well-being” is “the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy.” So a 30-something year old billionaire thinks that his research has figured out what drives people to being comfortable, healthy or happy and it’s based around something so simple as using a social network properly. Move over, Freud! Roll over, Plato!
The only good part of this interview is the end, where Zuckerberg owns Facebook’s lack of not doing a better job and looks out 5-10 years…
Mark Zuckerberg
We’re in the middle of a lot of issues, and I certainly think we could’ve done a better job so far. I’m optimistic that we’re going to address a lot of those challenges, and that we’ll get through this, and that when you look back five years from now, 10 years from now, people will look at the net effect of being able to connect online and have a voice and share what matters to them as just a massively positive thing in the world.
Cody here for the wrap up. I have to say I’m clearly disappointed with the way Zuckerberg and Facebook have handled the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica and other crises they are dealing with here. I’m worried that there are, once again, many more shoes to drop as other app development and advertising partners of Facebook’s might very well have mined and kept and sold their data to billions of users. I’ve trimmed some Facebook several times since we loaded up in the $20s and I’ve even nibbled some more Facebook common and calls on occasion since then too, always keeping a large core position. I most recently trimmed some Facebook a few weeks ago before the stock took a big hit here. I’m not about to unload all my remaining Facebook shares, but I’m not going to be adding to it either just now. I need to stew and ponder and analyze what exactly ours and Facebook’s long-term goals are. Facebook’s Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook itself are so incredibly popular and valuable and growing so quickly that I still see a lot of value here long-term. But I’m keeping Facebook in the penalty box for now, holding onto my remaining core position but not looking to buy back any of the shares I’ve trimmed any time soon either.
