Mark Zuckerberg wants you to stop wasting time. Let’s rephrase that. The founder of Facebook has let it be known that he wants you to waste time in a more “meaningful” way.
To that end, he is changing the almighty algorithm that decides what material is featured most prominently on each user’s Facebook news feed, the scrolling list of posts that appears when you visit the site. Instead of prioritising content that is most popular and keeps users’ eyeballs glued to the site, it will now promote content that encourages people to interact with their friends and family. In future, the more people exchange long comments about a post, the more it will be promoted.
This, Zuckerberg claims, will “help us connect with each other” rather than drifting passively through Facebook videos and clickbait in a state of zombie-like semi-consciousness while our precious hours of free time drain away. In reality, of course, it will simply substitute one sort of time-wasting for another. For all his platitudes about “well-being and happiness”, the real significance of Facebook’s move is not so much in what it’s done, but why.
Two billion people, a quarter of the world’s population, now use Facebook on a regular basis. It is one of the biggest companies on the planet, with a market value of $180 billion and annual profits of over $10 billion. With tweaks to its algorithm, it can make or break small businesses, change users’ moods and influence elections. So why is Zuckerberg now trying so hard to seem friendly?
Perhaps he can feel the tide turning. The list of complaints against Facebook is growing almost as fast as its user base. Last week, it agreed to pay damages to a 14-year-old Irish girl for repeatedly allowing naked “revenge porn” pictures of her to appear on the site. EU competition authorities have fined Facebook for misleading regulators, and last year saw its top lawyer grilled by congressional committees. It is under pressure for disseminating extremist videos, failing to take down abusive content and allowing itself to become a propaganda arm of Russia’s intelligence services. That’s even before we get to its effect on mental health.
The truth is that, however powerful and profitable, no organisation is entirely immune to the groundswell of public opinion. It could take regulators and politicians years to take down Zuckerberg’s empire, just as it did to split up J D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil 100 years ago, but if they wanted to do it, they would. Zuckerberg’s decision to change his algorithm, even if it causes Facebook’s traffic to drop, is an admission that no company can count on an infinite stock of goodwill from customers and governments. He wants users to feel better about using Facebook to protect it from criticism and there’s a sort of accountability in that. However invincible a corporation looks, recall that only 12 per cent of companies that were in the Fortune 500 in 1955 are still there today.
As to whether these algorithmic changes will set us free from the cloying embrace of social media addiction or staunch the flow of viral fake news, the answer is no. Facebook began life as a basic code that brought up pictures of Zuckerberg’s fellow undergraduates at Harvard in order to let users compare their attractiveness. So when this same man talks about “meaningful” social interactions that “bring us closer together”, remember how his company started.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2017
Juliet Samuel is a columnist for the Daily Telegraph.
