How Mark Zuckerberg Deliberately Made Facebook Worse

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast.

0:30Thomson Reuters and specialized bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment, and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second. Cheaper? OCI costs up to 50 % less for computing, 70 % less for storage, and 80 % less for networking. Better? In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.

1:12This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads. Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. Mint is still$15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's$15 a month. Two, seriously, it's$15 a month. Three, no big contracts. Four, I use it. Five, my mom uses it. Are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. A upfront payment of$45 per three-month plan,$15 per month equivalent required.

1:51New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. CementMobile.com Call Zone Media Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

2:12Better Offline 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 are now pretty much algorithmic nightmares. And they interrupt you constantly with suggested content and advertisements that far outweigh the stuff 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.

2:50The 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 decline 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 Skinner Boxer advertising agencies. In this episode, I want to frame Facebook's decline around two specific features.

3:26People 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 downhill because they went public, which is partially true, don't get me wrong.

4:07But 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 rogues gallery of rot economist assholes. 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.

4:55As you might have seen in 2010's The Social Network by Aaron Sorkin, Thiel 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 Lars Ulrich 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.

5:41Parker, 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 has doomed this company to this endless, miserable death march.

6:25All 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. Or 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.

7:06And 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 to torture them.

7:57The feed, which Facebook product manager Rujisangivi 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 you for, this is all kind of hard to grasp. It would show you literally every activity you and your friends did.

8:33If you joined or left a group or made a new connection, everyone could see it. It was almost like a panopticon, except you were both the jailer and the prisoner somehow. A few days later, Zuckerberg would apologise, saying that Facebook, and I quote, really messed this one up, and that Facebook spent two days coding non-stop to add a special privacy page that 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.

9:08This was the same year that Facebook opened to the general public, previously being just for college students, then for certain organizations. I 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. Huh. Yahoo in 2006. Who was with Prabhupada Raghuram? 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.

9:46Her name was Sheryl Sandberg, and she'd be the force that would grow Facebook into one of the most evil companies alive.

10:07Circling the block. Park smarter. Park faster. ParkWiz. Download the ParkWiz app today and save every time you park. So I've shopped with quints before they were an advertiser and after they became one. And then again, before I had to record this ad, I really like them. My green over shirt in particular looks great. I use it like a jacket. It's breathable and comfortable and hangs in my body nicely. I get a lot of compliments. I liked it so much. I got it in all the different colors, along with one of their corduroy ones, which I think I pull off. And really, that's the only person that matters.

10:36I also really love their linen shirts too. They're comfortable, they're breathable, and they look nice. Get a lot of compliments there too. I have a few of them. Love their rust-colored ones as well. And in general, I really like Quince. The shirts fit nicely and the rest of their clothes do too. They ship quickly, they look good, they're high quality, and they partner directly with Ethical Factories and Skip the Middlemen. So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. And I'm probably going to buy more from them very, very soon. Keep it classic and cool this fall.

11:04With long-lasting staples from Quince. Go to quince.com slash better for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash better. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash better. This is LeVar Arrington from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. Toyota is moving forward a more sustainable future by giving you the freedom to choose from an incredible lineup of trucks. Now available in both gas and hybrid models, including the legendary Tacoma and powerful Tundra. Both available with the iForce Max hybrid powertrain and backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability.

11:51More choices, less compromise. Visit buyatoyota.com for a great deal on an efficient Toyota today. Toyota, let's go places. 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 COO, Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl 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.

12:43Shamath 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, Schemath was asked to name it.

13:20And he came up with the term, MAUs. Sandberg responded that they should just call it growth. At the next board meeting, Shamath 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.

14:07All of these people now, by the way, have senior roles at the company. I want you to remember that throughout this story. Gleit, Olivan, and Schultz are at the epicenter of almost every single choice that Meta has made to put growth above the user experience. Shamarth wanted their team, which also included early Facebook data scientist Danny Ferrante 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.

14:48In 2008, Facebook would launch a feature called 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, Hill never really got Facebook to explain how it works.

15:31Nevertheless, Stephen Levy was able to get Shemath to reveal one horrifying detail. That 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're wondering where that came from?

16:07Well, 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're jumping to bloody conclusions. You're just putting words in their mouth. Incorrect. Now the CTO of Facebook, a 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.

16:56I 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, Backstrom 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 Times-Steven 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.

18:16Backstrom, 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 knew, offering you the tantalizing idea of proximity to them, And when you friended them, Facebook's newsfeed 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.

18:51And 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 them. This subtle feature is responsible for much of Facebook's growth, and it was deliberately engineered by rot economists like Schultz, Gleit and Ollivan 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.

19:30The 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, ah, 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 Herb's stark warning, and this is a quote, that millions of paedophiles were targeting tens of millions of children.

20:06People 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. Oliven is the COO. 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 Palli Patea left Facebook in 2011 to start a venture capital firm, his team, Schultz, Gleit and Oliven, 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.

20:58But we continue, because they're not done rotting yet. In January 2012, that's when it really would set in, with the launch of sponsored stories in Facebook's newsfeed, which Josh Constein, 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 had tested 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 newsfeed unless it could appear there naturally, a statement that Constine wrote without a single hint of alarm.

21:49Isn'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 for 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.

22:29After 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 Masseri to the head of Facebook's newsfeed 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.

23:10Or 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.

24:00It 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 fanfiction 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, noted 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.

24:59Boz 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 officer of meta and he's the mastermind by the way behind both meta's metaverse and their artificial intelligence goals.

25:35This 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.

26:20this 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.

27:17But 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, I don't 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.