Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and I was listening to a recent episode of pod Save America's offline series in which journalist Charlie Warzel joined the show to talk about Facebook and its role in causing harm on a global scale, which inspired me to do this episode. Now, before we get started, I guess I should apologize for the somewhat click baity title of this episode. We're going to be exploring algorithms and their unintended consequences, and we're focusing on the Facebook algorithm. That is, the algorithm that determines what appears in your news feed. But algorithms by themselves are not necessarily good or evil on their own. You know. It's kind of like what Hamlet said, Now, there's nothing neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. So let's start just by defining what an algorithm is. So, an algorithm is essentially a set of rules or directions that a system follows in order to process information and produce results. And that's it. So it's just a set of rules. Let's use a really simple analogy to explain this. Let's say I've hired you to sit on a bench by a road. Say it's a road that gets decent but not heavy traffic, And I say it's your job to make a tally mark on a sheet of paper whenever a silver car drives past you along this road, and you're to ignore all other cars, only make a tally when a silver car goes by. I just, you know, want to see how many tally marks are there at the end of a certain amount of time. Let's say it's an hour, and I have given you an algorithm tally every single silver car that drives past you. So you observe the vehicles that drive by you, you follow the directions, and that's the whole concept right there. Now. I feel like a lot of folks, including myself, sometimes use the word algorithm as a kind of way to save a bit of time, But it also tends to create a gap in understanding. Like, you know, the word algorithm acts kind of like the curtain between Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. You know something's going on back behind the curtain, but you can't actually see what it is, so we use the word algorithm to describe it, and then we just move on. Now. Part of the reason for that is that a lot of companies, big ones like Google and Facebook jealously guard their algorithms from critical view. To the outsider, it would be impossible to say whether the algorithm was working well or if it wasn't, because we don't necessarily know what the goal of the algorithm is in the first place. We know it is doing work, we know it's doing something, it's creating the results that we see, but we don't know if it's doing the best job at that. So this lack of transparency becomes a big issue in some cases, like with Facebook. And there are times when an algorithm is technically doing what it's supposed to do and it is doing it well by that definition, but that there are unintended consequences and sometimes really bad ones. I would argue that this is what we see with Facebook in particular. It's what's led the company Meta, you know, the company that owns Facebook, to get into hot water around the world because of issues like the spread of misinformation and hate speech. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying Facebook engineered an algorithm to spread that kind of bad content. Rather, Facebook engineers create a system that prioritizes that kind of content because that content fulfills other goals. So let's back up a bit and really get to grips with what's actually going on. First, let us consider what Facebook started out as, because it was a much less expansive and influential site when it launched way back in two thousand four. Back then, it was, in Mark Zuckerberg's own estimation, a tool for Harvard students, presumably mostly male ones, to rank the quote unquote hot girls on campus. So Facebook, the site has always been a creep. It's just now it's a much older and much more influential creep. Anyway, running a site costs money. There are hosting services and bandwidth fees and other stuff that you have to cover, so there needed to be a way to offset the costs of running this pretty basic social network. In April of two thousand four, Zuckerberg introduced flyers and you know f L y e r s. These were essentially banner ads on Facebook's homepage. So these are the same kind of banner ads that would appear, you know, on the top, bottom or sides of any website that you visited. The ads were really mostly for local businesses, So this was really small potatoes stuff, but it meant that there was some money coming in that would help offset Facebook's costs. Facebook group pretty rapidly and the company received some investment capital, but it needed to establish a way to generate more revenue. See, in the world of startups, there are a couple of different pathways you can try to take. Actually there's more than a couple, but there's really only a couple of successful pathways. One is to become attractive enough as a product, service, or business that some other bigger fish is going to come along and scoop you up in an acquisition and you'll cash out with millions of dollars. In fact, that fuels a ton of the startup culture these days, and I've talked about it in the past about how I think it's a pretty dangerous and unhealthy trend. But the other way is to build a business that generates more money and revenue than it costs to operate the business, and to build it in such a way that you can scale up the business as it grows, making more money while also spending more to maintain a larger business. This is a really hard thing to do. A lot of companies struggle with it, and I'm guessing this is why the acquisition culture runs so strong in startups. It's not easy to be seen as important enough to acquire. That's I'm not trying to downplay that. It is tough. You've got to make something that is flashy enough and and potentially important enough for someone else to come along and say we want that. But that can be easier than creating a business model that supports itself throughout the various phases of a company's growth. That is really hard to do well. Facebook was looking to go that second route, you know, the actual business route, as opposed to getting acquired, and in November two thousand seven, the site introduced Facebook Ads Now. That product had a few different facets. One was that businesses would be allowed to create Facebook pages that could operate in ways similar to an actual human beings Facebook page works, and that would give folks the chance to quote unquote like a business that they were interested in. Another facet was the Facebook Marketplace, which exists to this day, and a third was a product called Beacon. Now. This product would be one of the first to inspire legal action against Facebook. You see, Beacon was a tool that would collect data from external websites sites that were not Facebook, and send that data back to Facebook. These were partnered websites companies that had partnered with Facebook to be part of this program. So if you went online and you started shopping for shoes, and if you were visiting, you know, these sites that were part of this Beacon program, your activities would be sent back to Facebook for the purposes of targeted advertising, which meant the next time you jumped on Facebook, you would start seeing shoe adds. The problem was Facebook didn't alert users to this program, nor did it allow people the chance to opt out of the service, and so Facebook was tracking users even if they weren't actively connected to Facebook at the time, as long as they were logged in and they were, you know, not necessarily logged in and active on the site, but like they hadn't logged out of their account, then this activity would continue to be tracked as they went to other sites. After users brought a class action lawsuit against Facebook, the company shut down Beacon in two thousand nine. That doesn't mean Facebook said goodbye to targeted ads. Far from it, and that brings us to something really important. Facebook makes the majority of its revenue from advertising, and ads only make money if there are people to see them. It would not make any sense to put up a billboard in the middle of Antarctica, right, I mean, no one would ever see the billboard. That would just be a waste of money. So you've got to put ads where people are going to see them. So Facebook's business model revolves around getting as many people to see as many ads as is possible. So for Facebook, that means getting as many people to log into Facebook as they can and then keeping those people on Facebook as much as is possible. That's the end goal, because it means serving more ads to more people. Well, we'll talk about stuff like engagement a bit later, but really engagement isn't the important bit like that engagement on Facebook. Like, if if Facebook could guarantee that it would get the same number of ads viewed without worrying about engagement, they would drop the whole thing about engagement, trust me. So the important bit is really just getting eyeballs on ads. That's it. Now, you could argue that the sole purpose of Facebook, at least from the business standpoint is just that getting eyes on ads. The features, the connectivity, all of that stuff is just the bit that brings folks in to use the platform. But from a revenue side, it's just about getting as many folks to look at ads as as possible. That's where the algorithm comes into play. And when people talk about Facebook algorithms, they typically mean a couple of different ones. One is the way that Facebook determines what shows up in a user's news feed. What do you see when you log into Facebook. Longtime Facebook users often limit the fact that the site no longer posts stuff in reverse chronological order on your news feed. You used to be able to really do that for real, Like you would see the most recent posts at the top, and you could just scroll down and you go back in time. You would see the older posts, like the from most recent to the oldest, and you could get caught up. Like you could actually do that, But that means that your time on Facebook would be kept too fairly short bursts unless you've just got a lot of chatty friends who are constantly posting, And since revenue comes from having more people seeing the site for as long as possible, that's not great for Facebook, right That's why the reverse chronological order is not a huge priority for Facebook, because even though users might love it, they wouldn't necessarily spend as much time on the platform. So the company set out to make algorithms that would select content across your friends and interests. In an effort to keep users glued to the site longer. You might end up missing stuff from your friends. In fact, I guarantee that's happening to you if you are on Facebook, that you are not seeing stuff that some of your friends are posting because the algorithm isn't promoting it to you, And it's because the algorithm chose to promote something else for you to see instead of the stuff that your friends are posting. We can also talk about algorithms in the sense of advertising algorithms, that being the algorithms that determine which ads get displayed to a specific user, But the news feed algorithm tends to be the big one that most people talk about when they say the Facebook algorithm. So this has actually gotten Facebook into trouble a few times, even before we started seeing stuff like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or we started seeing the various times that that Congress has called Facebook executives to testify about stuff like misinformation and hate speech. Way back in two thousand fifteen, content sites in general saw a seismic shift because of something Facebook did, and this would end up disrupting the entire industry of online content, from news organizations to entertainment sites. And that shift had a name. It was called pivot to video. Just saying those words fills me with dread. So making content is hard. I do it nearly every day. It can be grueling, you know, writing up long pieces takes a lot of time and research and a lot of specialized talent. If you want to do it well, I mean you could just be a content farm and dump endless numbers of articles that are hastily written, badly researched, and poorly edited. You can do that, Uh it doesn't you know. You can try and make it up in volume, but if you go the quality route, you tend to see better results. Uh. And in two thousand and fifteen, we saw a convergence of several things that would prompt a lot of content companies to change the way they do business. First, AD revenue for owned and operated sites was hurting. So that by that, I mean if you were a media company and you had your own website, you were starting to see lower amounts of traffic, which meant you were also seeing lower payouts and ads. It was probably devaluing the ads that were on your site. In other words, when companies make these ad deals, they negotiate with the advertisers a certain amount per view or per click or per action or whatever the criteria are, and the as a whole, like, if you're doing really well, then you can demand a higher rate. It's kind of like how in the US commercials during the Super Bowl are incredibly expensive because everyone knows that that's where a ton of attention happens to be focused at that particular time, So the ad space on a game of the super Bowl ends up being really, really, really valuable. The same sort of thing. If your site is doing really well, then you can command a higher price. But at this point, content companies were starting to have difficulty. They were seeing there there the value of their ad deals going down, not up. Traffic was going down, not up, And a lot of sites are dependent upon stuff like search engines as well. If you rank high in Google, that's really important. The Google algorithm is another example of an algorithm that you could argue could be evil, but it means that there are more chances for people to find your work. If you're ranking high in search, right, someone searches a particular term, your site comes up. That's great for you, and thus more people will end up going to your site and seeing the ads that are on your site, and you generate revenue. We saw some companies experiment with stuff like paywalls, you know, getting away from the whole advertising thing and saying, well, we will instead uh invite users to pay a subscription to get our content. A lot of users balked at that because they were used to getting their content for quote unquote free, though we know it wasn't really for free. It was just that the money wasn't coming directly out of the user's pocket in those cases. Now, a big part of the problem was that rather than go on owned and operated sites, a lot of people were just gobbling up content on places like Facebook. So social network platforms became a competitive marketplace for content creators, with many trying to find ways to craft their work. Uh. Just so that it would be effective when you share it on social media doesn't mean it would be the best work you've ever made, but rather you were trying to make stuff that was share able. Oh man, I remember this era and it was bleak anyway. At the same time, you had smartphone companies that were really coming into their own I mean, the smartphone was starting to dominate the computer space. They had premiered less than a decade earlier, but the swift proliferation of smartphones meant that people were starting to consume content a little bit differently than they had before. A good site would optimize for mobile access, and we started seeing people say that the future of the web was really and how it would cater to mobile devices, and we saw various content sites looking for ways to cut costs. This was the other big element here. And one way is you can really reduce your writing staff. You can have layoffs, but you still need to make a lot of content or else you have no inventory to sell to advertisers, and then the revenue drives up. And that's what would set the stage for a really big problem. Alex lay More after we take this short break. Okay, this all brings us up to the pivoting to video movement. So in early Facebook announced a shift to video, indicating that the platform would prioritize video content from third party publishers, and that implies that it would simultaneously de emphasize content that wasn't videos. So, if you were a third party publisher and you were making stuff like articles like how staff works is a great example. I used to write for how Stuff Works. And if you were doing these articles and you were hoping that at least some of your traffic was going to come from social networking sites, you hear this news and you think, oh, well, now, even if I write a great article and if not given a fantastic title and it's really share able, the Facebook algorithm is going to de emphasize it because it's not video. It's written con tent, and the Facebook algorithm has decided to promote video content instead. Uh. There were a lot of content companies that legitimately got real nervous about this for good reason. So the message appeared to be, if you want your content to be seen on Facebook, you should probably put it in short form video content form. And now, now why would Facebook even do this? Well, one big reason is that if you click on a link in Facebook to go read an article, you leave Facebook. And since the revenue model for Facebook is again all about keeping as many eyeballs on the site for as long as possible. That means Facebook hates that but video and Facebook could build a media player, and they did that could work within the news feed and just host videos natively on the Facebook site so you didn't go away from Facebook to watch the videos. They played within the Facebook page, so people could just click on those videos and watch them and not leave face book. Facebook loved that idea. If the user news feeds just filled up with video after video and all of them called, you know, Facebook home, even though the actual content was coming from other companies, well, that would just work out fine for Facebook. The shift to video would have an enormous impact on content companies. Several companies began cutting back on staff, keeping a small group of writers and editors whose main job wasn't to publish articles, but rather write and produce as many videos as possible. I saw this happen in front of my own eyes. But that's a story for a different time. Anyway, a lot of talented people found themselves out of a job as dozens of content companies made the pivot to video. You also heard a lot of stories about this is kind of around the same time where the perception of journalism was taking a pretty big hit, like people were starting to say that journalism was dead. That kind of ties into this too well. Anyway, companies chose to pivot to video in part because they could have a smaller video department than a writing staff. Often that would also involve bringing in new employees out of college to work on the video team, because new employees often have lower salaries than more established employees who might be let go. But companies wouldn't have done this unless the revenue side was also in place, right, Like, it's one thing to cut costs, but it means nothing if you do that if you're not also bringing in the cash. You have to be bringing in revenue. And the problem was the industry was responding to a misrepresentation of the facts uh an error in other words, or, if you are particularly cynical, a lie. See. In January, Facebook presented some pretty startling figures saying that Facebook users were watching more than a billion videos per day. What's more, the company said that users were watching tons of ads in the videos in the process, that, in other words, producing videos to publish on Facebook would be a great way to show a lot of ads to a lot of people, and the revenue would come flowing in for everyone concerned. But things were not quite playing out that way. Some companies had gone so far as to ditch their owned and operated sites and they relied exclusively on building out content to live on sites like Facebook, which I need to say, in case you didn't pick it up from my tone, is a terrible idea. They were trying to respond to a rapidly shifting landscape, so in their minds they were saying, well, if no one's coming to our website, then we're just wasting money maintaining it, so let's just change over to Facebook. So the pivot to video phrase would also end up taking on an additional meaning. A couple of them, for example, one of them was a cheeky way to refer to layoffs. You know, layoffs are coming up. It's because the company is quote unquote pivoting to video. Um, so that that's kind of tells you all you need to know about that particular phrase, like it became a euphemism. Meanwhile, the revenue numbers weren't actually matching up with what was to be expected based upon Facebook's kind of sales pitch to the industry, and in February two sixteen, Facebook essentially said, whoops are bad. Remember when we talked about how many ads the average person was watching in videos, It turns out we overestimated that a bit, perhaps by as much as eighty percent. So imagine for a moment that you want to open up a business. Let's say it's a bakery and you're looking for the perfect place to locate it. And you have a realtor who tells you that they have a spot that's in an area that gets a ton of foot traffic, and it's ideal for your location, it's in your price range, it's ready to go. So you signed the deal, you rent out the spot, you build out your bakery. But then you find out the realtor quote unquote or estimated the foot traffic by That would be a huge blow to your bakery business, right, I mean, like, now you don't have that foot traffic to depend upon to get customers. It's gonna be way harder. Doesn't mean that you've necessarily outright failed, but you're not going to have the path to success you thought you were. You might not even be able to stay in business. Well, here you had all these advertising companies that had banked on this, and all these content companies that had put all their eggs in the Facebook video basket. Some of the content companies no longer had their own websites, so they had really decided to throw all in on short video content that being the future of content creation. And it turned out that Facebook had fudged, or at the very least misinterpreted the numbers. A lawsuit in two thousand eighteen alleged that Facebook learned of this overestimation error earlier but kept it a secret, not admitting to the problem until it became unavoidable. In fact, the lawsuit alleged that the overestimation wasn't six like you know, Facebook, uh. The argument was that they or Facebook had said that it accidentally overstated the numbers of people who are watching ads by six. The lawsuits said, no, no, no, it was more like you you misrepresented it by a hundred fifty to nine hundred percent, drastically overstating how many people were watching ads in these little videos. Facebook would eventually settle with advertisers out of court, agreeing to pay around forty million dollars to the advertisers, but the content companies were kind of left in the lurch. Now, during this era, from around late two thousand fourteen to two thousand sixteen or so, Facebook's algorithm was favoring video over other types of content. But since people weren't actually watching an endless stream of videos with ads, that meant that the strategy of video wasn't working. It wasn't working for the content companies, and more importantly, for Facebook, it wasn't working for Facebook. It wasn't keeping people on Facebook the way they wanted it to, and so the company would change its algorithm. Now you could say that Facebook pivoted away from video. Meanwhile, all those companies were, you know, left behind. And granted, there were tons of folks who had been saying, you know, don't do this, and then they could say I told you so to the people that were relying on a third party. You know, there are a lot of people who say that's a bad idea to rely on a third party for distributing your content, that if you don't own it, when something changes your you can be hurt. And this happens all the time. It happens with Facebook, it happens with Google, it happens with YouTube. Every time there's a change in the algorithm, you'll hear about how certain sites benefit or certain content creators benefit and others suffer. But you know the fact is that a ton of folks jumped on that bandwagon already and they were all hit negatively by this whole uh shift. Anyway, let's talk about what Facebook's shift in its algorithm actually meant. Now. I have to talk about this kind of in vague and high level ways because Facebook, like Google, is not transparent about its algorithms. Now we know a lot of stuff because of the leaked internal documents that came to light recently, but the company has never been super upfront with how much you know or how it determines the content you've seen on your news feed. Generally speaking, Facebook shifted its focus towards content that quote unquote drives engagement. That is, content that seems to inspire people to interact with that content in some way, like leaving a comment or clicking like or dislike, or sharing a post of Facebook really loves it when people share posts. The actual content of the post doesn't matter to Facebook. They are content agnostic when it comes to that. What matters to Facebook is that people are engaging with that content and thus spending more time on the platform. That yeah, that's what it really boils down to. If you're engaging in content, it means you're still on Facebook. You haven't left. And like I said in the beginning, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about. Facebook's just concerned with keeping as many people on the platform for as long as possible and that's it. So promoting material that gets people to spend more time on the platform just makes sense from that business perspective. Unfortunately, one of the crappy things about humans is that we tend to respond with or to outrage more readily than just about anything else. If something makes you mad, you're way more likely to act on that, and a lot of posts that quote unquote drive engagement are really all about outrage from different perspectives. Like a post could be about how a certain group of people are awful. Whether those people are awful or not doesn't matter. It's the fact that someone has made a post saying that. That's what matters. So the people who agree with the post, who might harbor strong negative feelings about the people who are mentioned in the post, they chime in others who sympathize with the people you singled out, maybe they are members of that group. They leap to the defense or they go on a counter attack against the person who posted it. There's enough outrage to go around, so you end up with a bunch of angry people waging battles across Facebook comments sections, and the algorithm, seeing that certain posts are generating a ton of quote unquote engagement, steps it up to promote those posts into more news feeds and thus spreads them further and wider. Because if the engagement is going up, it means more people are spending more time on Facebook, so there are more ads to serve. Now there's a lot going on here from a sociological standpoint, right. I mean, we've seen hates speech, racism, and misogyny spread like wildfire across Facebook. And while the battles in the comments rage, the algorithm just keeps stirring things up. We have to remember there are real world consequences to this online activity. People and vulnerable populations can be made to feel unsafe. That's a powerful and destructive thing. Folks can be driven to extremist views, joining echo chambers that reinforce beliefs and stereotypes that are outright harmful. People who are neither targeted nor pulled into groupthink might find themselves just distressed over the whole thing. It's pretty ugly stuff. And this is how misinformation and hate speech takes hold on Facebook. The algorithm, which is again content agnostic, recognizes that whatever is being posted is effective, and that's all that really matters, so we get an amplification chamber. Now, don't think anyone at Facebook necessarily saw this coming, at least not early on, or that the folks who worked on the algorithm intended it to spread hard, full material in a way that is alarmingly effective. I think they just didn't bank on human nature being what it is, or the fact that you have certain agents out there, Russian backed and Chinese backed agents who, once they figured out how to game the system, would flood Facebook with posts designed to drive engagement and spread misinformation and thus get caught up in this algorithm promotion and spread harmful messages. But the fact remains that this is what we're seeing play out. Facebook has attempted to address this with various content moderation strategies, but the company does so while also trying to walk a fine line and not trigger criticism from various sources such as the conservative right. The fear is that too much moderation will be perceived as censorship, and that the company is actively trying to silence conservative voices. Facebook has been the target of such criticism on multiple occasions, so the solution tends to be to use a very light touch when moderating content. Meanwhile, the messages continue to populate Facebook users news feeds. Now. I called this episode the evil Algorithm, And again, I don't necessarily think an algorithm is on its own evil, but I do think continuing to rely on an algorithm that is demonstrably causing harm is pretty darn evil. At the very least, it is unethical and irresponsible. However, you know, again, it's like at the very heart of Facebook's business strategy. And that was something that that Charlie was saying on Pod Save America that the very core of Facebook's purpose, like it's it's mission as far as a business is concerned, is at odds with you know, not causing harm, like that those two things can't really coexist because of just the way it has evolved from this site. That was meant to rank the attractiveness of female students at Harvard. Who would have thought that's such a thing could go so horribly wrong. Anyway, that's it for this episode. I really wanted to lay it out because I feel like when we talk about algorithms, we get so so lucy goosey with our words that it just becomes a like a blanket term that doesn't really mean anything. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. To handle for the show is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and I was listening to a recent episode of pod Save America's offline series in which journalist Charlie Warzel joined the show to talk about Facebook and its role in causing harm on a global scale, which inspired me to do this episode. Now, before we get started, I guess I should apologize for the somewhat click baity title of this episode. We're going to be exploring algorithms and their unintended consequences, and we're focusing on the Facebook algorithm. That is, the algorithm that determines what appears in your news feed. But algorithms by themselves are not necessarily good or evil on their own. You know. It's kind of like what Hamlet said, Now, there's nothing neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. So let's start just by defining what an algorithm is. So, an algorithm is essentially a set of rules or directions that a system follows in order to process information and produce results. And that's it. So it's just a set of rules. Let's use a really simple analogy to explain this. Let's say I've hired you to sit on a bench by a road. Say it's a road that gets decent but not heavy traffic, And I say it's your job to make a tally mark on a sheet of paper whenever a silver car drives past you along this road, and you're to ignore all other cars, only make a tally when a silver car goes by. I just, you know, want to see how many tally marks are there at the end of a certain amount of time. Let's say it's an hour, and I have given you an algorithm tally every single silver car that drives past you. So you observe the vehicles that drive by you, you follow the directions, and that's the whole concept right there. Now. I feel like a lot of folks, including myself, sometimes use the word algorithm as a kind of way to save a bit of time, But it also tends to create a gap in understanding. Like, you know, the word algorithm acts kind of like the curtain between Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. You know something's going on back behind the curtain, but you can't actually see what it is, so we use the word algorithm to describe it, and then we just move on. Now. Part of the reason for that is that a lot of companies, big ones like Google and Facebook jealously guard their algorithms from critical view. To the outsider, it would be impossible to say whether the algorithm was working well or if it wasn't, because we don't necessarily know what the goal of the algorithm is in the first place. We know it is doing work, we know it's doing something, it's creating the results that we see, but we don't know if it's doing the best job at that. So this lack of transparency becomes a big issue in some cases, like with Facebook. And there are times when an algorithm is technically doing what it's supposed to do and it is doing it well by that definition, but that there are unintended consequences and sometimes really bad ones. I would argue that this is what we see with Facebook in particular. It's what's led the company Meta, you know, the company that owns Facebook, to get into hot water around the world because of issues like the spread of misinformation and hate speech. Now, to be clear, I'm not saying Facebook engineered an algorithm to spread that kind of bad content. Rather, Facebook engineers create a system that prioritizes that kind of content because that content fulfills other goals. So let's back up a bit and really get to grips with what's actually going on. First, let us consider what Facebook started out as, because it was a much less expansive and influential site when it launched way back in two thousand four. Back then, it was, in Mark Zuckerberg's own estimation, a tool for Harvard students, presumably mostly male ones, to rank the quote unquote hot girls on campus. So Facebook, the site has always been a creep. It's just now it's a much older and much more influential creep. Anyway, running a site costs money. There are hosting services and bandwidth fees and other stuff that you have to cover, so there needed to be a way to offset the costs of running this pretty basic social network. In April of two thousand four, Zuckerberg introduced flyers and you know f L y e r s. These were essentially banner ads on Facebook's homepage. So these are the same kind of banner ads that would appear, you know, on the top, bottom or sides of any website that you visited. The ads were really mostly for local businesses, So this was really small potatoes stuff, but it meant that there was some money coming in that would help offset Facebook's costs. Facebook group pretty rapidly and the company received some investment capital, but it needed to establish a way to generate more revenue. See, in the world of startups, there are a couple of different pathways you can try to take. Actually there's more than a couple, but there's really only a couple of successful pathways. One is to become attractive enough as a product, service, or business that some other bigger fish is going to come along and scoop you up in an acquisition and you'll cash out with millions of dollars. In fact, that fuels a ton of the startup culture these days, and I've talked about it in the past about how I think it's a pretty dangerous and unhealthy trend. But the other way is to build a business that generates more money and revenue than it costs to operate the business, and to build it in such a way that you can scale up the business as it grows, making more money while also spending more to maintain a larger business. This is a really hard thing to do. A lot of companies struggle with it, and I'm guessing this is why the acquisition culture runs so strong in startups. It's not easy to be seen as important enough to acquire. That's I'm not trying to downplay that. It is tough. You've got to make something that is flashy enough and and potentially important enough for someone else to come along and say we want that. But that can be easier than creating a business model that supports itself throughout the various phases of a company's growth. That is really hard to do well. Facebook was looking to go that second route, you know, the actual business route, as opposed to getting acquired, and in November two thousand seven, the site introduced Facebook Ads Now. That product had a few different facets. One was that businesses would be allowed to create Facebook pages that could operate in ways similar to an actual human beings Facebook page works, and that would give folks the chance to quote unquote like a business that they were interested in. Another facet was the Facebook Marketplace, which exists to this day, and a third was a product called Beacon. Now. This product would be one of the first to inspire legal action against Facebook. You see, Beacon was a tool that would collect data from external websites sites that were not Facebook, and send that data back to Facebook. These were partnered websites companies that had partnered with Facebook to be part of this program. So if you went online and you started shopping for shoes, and if you were visiting, you know, these sites that were part of this Beacon program, your activities would be sent back to Facebook for the purposes of targeted advertising, which meant the next time you jumped on Facebook, you would start seeing shoe adds. The problem was Facebook didn't alert users to this program, nor did it allow people the chance to opt out of the service, and so Facebook was tracking users even if they weren't actively connected to Facebook at the time, as long as they were logged in and they were, you know, not necessarily logged in and active on the site, but like they hadn't logged out of their account, then this activity would continue to be tracked as they went to other sites. After users brought a class action lawsuit against Facebook, the company shut down Beacon in two thousand nine. That doesn't mean Facebook said goodbye to targeted ads. Far from it, and that brings us to something really important. Facebook makes the majority of its revenue from advertising, and ads only make money if there are people to see them. It would not make any sense to put up a billboard in the middle of Antarctica, right, I mean, no one would ever see the billboard. That would just be a waste of money. So you've got to put ads where people are going to see them. So Facebook's business model revolves around getting as many people to see as many ads as is possible. So for Facebook, that means getting as many people to log into Facebook as they can and then keeping those people on Facebook as much as is possible. That's the end goal, because it means serving more ads to more people. Well, we'll talk about stuff like engagement a bit later, but really engagement isn't the important bit like that engagement on Facebook. Like, if if Facebook could guarantee that it would get the same number of ads viewed without worrying about engagement, they would drop the whole thing about engagement, trust me. So the important bit is really just getting eyeballs on ads. That's it. Now, you could argue that the sole purpose of Facebook, at least from the business standpoint is just that getting eyes on ads. The features, the connectivity, all of that stuff is just the bit that brings folks in to use the platform. But from a revenue side, it's just about getting as many folks to look at ads as as possible. That's where the algorithm comes into play. And when people talk about Facebook algorithms, they typically mean a couple of different ones. One is the way that Facebook determines what shows up in a user's news feed. What do you see when you log into Facebook. Longtime Facebook users often limit the fact that the site no longer posts stuff in reverse chronological order on your news feed. You used to be able to really do that for real, Like you would see the most recent posts at the top, and you could just scroll down and you go back in time. You would see the older posts, like the from most recent to the oldest, and you could get caught up. Like you could actually do that, But that means that your time on Facebook would be kept too fairly short bursts unless you've just got a lot of chatty friends who are constantly posting, And since revenue comes from having more people seeing the site for as long as possible, that's not great for Facebook, right That's why the reverse chronological order is not a huge priority for Facebook, because even though users might love it, they wouldn't necessarily spend as much time on the platform. So the company set out to make algorithms that would select content across your friends and interests. In an effort to keep users glued to the site longer. You might end up missing stuff from your friends. In fact, I guarantee that's happening to you if you are on Facebook, that you are not seeing stuff that some of your friends are posting because the algorithm isn't promoting it to you, And it's because the algorithm chose to promote something else for you to see instead of the stuff that your friends are posting. We can also talk about algorithms in the sense of advertising algorithms, that being the algorithms that determine which ads get displayed to a specific user, But the news feed algorithm tends to be the big one that most people talk about when they say the Facebook algorithm. So this has actually gotten Facebook into trouble a few times, even before we started seeing stuff like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or we started seeing the various times that that Congress has called Facebook executives to testify about stuff like misinformation and hate speech. Way back in two thousand fifteen, content sites in general saw a seismic shift because of something Facebook did, and this would end up disrupting the entire industry of online content, from news organizations to entertainment sites. And that shift had a name. It was called pivot to video. Just saying those words fills me with dread. So making content is hard. I do it nearly every day. It can be grueling, you know, writing up long pieces takes a lot of time and research and a lot of specialized talent. If you want to do it well, I mean you could just be a content farm and dump endless numbers of articles that are hastily written, badly researched, and poorly edited. You can do that, Uh it doesn't you know. You can try and make it up in volume, but if you go the quality route, you tend to see better results. Uh. And in two thousand and fifteen, we saw a convergence of several things that would prompt a lot of content companies to change the way they do business. First, AD revenue for owned and operated sites was hurting. So that by that, I mean if you were a media company and you had your own website, you were starting to see lower amounts of traffic, which meant you were also seeing lower payouts and ads. It was probably devaluing the ads that were on your site. In other words, when companies make these ad deals, they negotiate with the advertisers a certain amount per view or per click or per action or whatever the criteria are, and the as a whole, like, if you're doing really well, then you can demand a higher rate. It's kind of like how in the US commercials during the Super Bowl are incredibly expensive because everyone knows that that's where a ton of attention happens to be focused at that particular time, So the ad space on a game of the super Bowl ends up being really, really, really valuable. The same sort of thing. If your site is doing really well, then you can command a higher price. But at this point, content companies were starting to have difficulty. They were seeing there there the value of their ad deals going down, not up. Traffic was going down, not up, And a lot of sites are dependent upon stuff like search engines as well. If you rank high in Google, that's really important. The Google algorithm is another example of an algorithm that you could argue could be evil, but it means that there are more chances for people to find your work. If you're ranking high in search, right, someone searches a particular term, your site comes up. That's great for you, and thus more people will end up going to your site and seeing the ads that are on your site, and you generate revenue. We saw some companies experiment with stuff like paywalls, you know, getting away from the whole advertising thing and saying, well, we will instead uh invite users to pay a subscription to get our content. A lot of users balked at that because they were used to getting their content for quote unquote free, though we know it wasn't really for free. It was just that the money wasn't coming directly out of the user's pocket in those cases. Now, a big part of the problem was that rather than go on owned and operated sites, a lot of people were just gobbling up content on places like Facebook. So social network platforms became a competitive marketplace for content creators, with many trying to find ways to craft their work. Uh. Just so that it would be effective when you share it on social media doesn't mean it would be the best work you've ever made, but rather you were trying to make stuff that was share able. Oh man, I remember this era and it was bleak anyway. At the same time, you had smartphone companies that were really coming into their own I mean, the smartphone was starting to dominate the computer space. They had premiered less than a decade earlier, but the swift proliferation of smartphones meant that people were starting to consume content a little bit differently than they had before. A good site would optimize for mobile access, and we started seeing people say that the future of the web was really and how it would cater to mobile devices, and we saw various content sites looking for ways to cut costs. This was the other big element here. And one way is you can really reduce your writing staff. You can have layoffs, but you still need to make a lot of content or else you have no inventory to sell to advertisers, and then the revenue drives up. And that's what would set the stage for a really big problem. Alex lay More after we take this short break. Okay, this all brings us up to the pivoting to video movement. So in early Facebook announced a shift to video, indicating that the platform would prioritize video content from third party publishers, and that implies that it would simultaneously de emphasize content that wasn't videos. So, if you were a third party publisher and you were making stuff like articles like how staff works is a great example. I used to write for how Stuff Works. And if you were doing these articles and you were hoping that at least some of your traffic was going to come from social networking sites, you hear this news and you think, oh, well, now, even if I write a great article and if not given a fantastic title and it's really share able, the Facebook algorithm is going to de emphasize it because it's not video. It's written con tent, and the Facebook algorithm has decided to promote video content instead. Uh. There were a lot of content companies that legitimately got real nervous about this for good reason. So the message appeared to be, if you want your content to be seen on Facebook, you should probably put it in short form video content form. And now, now why would Facebook even do this? Well, one big reason is that if you click on a link in Facebook to go read an article, you leave Facebook. And since the revenue model for Facebook is again all about keeping as many eyeballs on the site for as long as possible. That means Facebook hates that but video and Facebook could build a media player, and they did that could work within the news feed and just host videos natively on the Facebook site so you didn't go away from Facebook to watch the videos. They played within the Facebook page, so people could just click on those videos and watch them and not leave face book. Facebook loved that idea. If the user news feeds just filled up with video after video and all of them called, you know, Facebook home, even though the actual content was coming from other companies, well, that would just work out fine for Facebook. The shift to video would have an enormous impact on content companies. Several companies began cutting back on staff, keeping a small group of writers and editors whose main job wasn't to publish articles, but rather write and produce as many videos as possible. I saw this happen in front of my own eyes. But that's a story for a different time. Anyway, a lot of talented people found themselves out of a job as dozens of content companies made the pivot to video. You also heard a lot of stories about this is kind of around the same time where the perception of journalism was taking a pretty big hit, like people were starting to say that journalism was dead. That kind of ties into this too well. Anyway, companies chose to pivot to video in part because they could have a smaller video department than a writing staff. Often that would also involve bringing in new employees out of college to work on the video team, because new employees often have lower salaries than more established employees who might be let go. But companies wouldn't have done this unless the revenue side was also in place, right, Like, it's one thing to cut costs, but it means nothing if you do that if you're not also bringing in the cash. You have to be bringing in revenue. And the problem was the industry was responding to a misrepresentation of the facts uh an error in other words, or, if you are particularly cynical, a lie. See. In January, Facebook presented some pretty startling figures saying that Facebook users were watching more than a billion videos per day. What's more, the company said that users were watching tons of ads in the videos in the process, that, in other words, producing videos to publish on Facebook would be a great way to show a lot of ads to a lot of people, and the revenue would come flowing in for everyone concerned. But things were not quite playing out that way. Some companies had gone so far as to ditch their owned and operated sites and they relied exclusively on building out content to live on sites like Facebook, which I need to say, in case you didn't pick it up from my tone, is a terrible idea. They were trying to respond to a rapidly shifting landscape, so in their minds they were saying, well, if no one's coming to our website, then we're just wasting money maintaining it, so let's just change over to Facebook. So the pivot to video phrase would also end up taking on an additional meaning. A couple of them, for example, one of them was a cheeky way to refer to layoffs. You know, layoffs are coming up. It's because the company is quote unquote pivoting to video. Um, so that that's kind of tells you all you need to know about that particular phrase, like it became a euphemism. Meanwhile, the revenue numbers weren't actually matching up with what was to be expected based upon Facebook's kind of sales pitch to the industry, and in February two sixteen, Facebook essentially said, whoops are bad. Remember when we talked about how many ads the average person was watching in videos, It turns out we overestimated that a bit, perhaps by as much as eighty percent. So imagine for a moment that you want to open up a business. Let's say it's a bakery and you're looking for the perfect place to locate it. And you have a realtor who tells you that they have a spot that's in an area that gets a ton of foot traffic, and it's ideal for your location, it's in your price range, it's ready to go. So you signed the deal, you rent out the spot, you build out your bakery. But then you find out the realtor quote unquote or estimated the foot traffic by That would be a huge blow to your bakery business, right, I mean, like, now you don't have that foot traffic to depend upon to get customers. It's gonna be way harder. Doesn't mean that you've necessarily outright failed, but you're not going to have the path to success you thought you were. You might not even be able to stay in business. Well, here you had all these advertising companies that had banked on this, and all these content companies that had put all their eggs in the Facebook video basket. Some of the content companies no longer had their own websites, so they had really decided to throw all in on short video content that being the future of content creation. And it turned out that Facebook had fudged, or at the very least misinterpreted the numbers. A lawsuit in two thousand eighteen alleged that Facebook learned of this overestimation error earlier but kept it a secret, not admitting to the problem until it became unavoidable. In fact, the lawsuit alleged that the overestimation wasn't six like you know, Facebook, uh. The argument was that they or Facebook had said that it accidentally overstated the numbers of people who are watching ads by six. The lawsuits said, no, no, no, it was more like you you misrepresented it by a hundred fifty to nine hundred percent, drastically overstating how many people were watching ads in these little videos. Facebook would eventually settle with advertisers out of court, agreeing to pay around forty million dollars to the advertisers, but the content companies were kind of left in the lurch. Now, during this era, from around late two thousand fourteen to two thousand sixteen or so, Facebook's algorithm was favoring video over other types of content. But since people weren't actually watching an endless stream of videos with ads, that meant that the strategy of video wasn't working. It wasn't working for the content companies, and more importantly, for Facebook, it wasn't working for Facebook. It wasn't keeping people on Facebook the way they wanted it to, and so the company would change its algorithm. Now you could say that Facebook pivoted away from video. Meanwhile, all those companies were, you know, left behind. And granted, there were tons of folks who had been saying, you know, don't do this, and then they could say I told you so to the people that were relying on a third party. You know, there are a lot of people who say that's a bad idea to rely on a third party for distributing your content, that if you don't own it, when something changes your you can be hurt. And this happens all the time. It happens with Facebook, it happens with Google, it happens with YouTube. Every time there's a change in the algorithm, you'll hear about how certain sites benefit or certain content creators benefit and others suffer. But you know the fact is that a ton of folks jumped on that bandwagon already and they were all hit negatively by this whole uh shift. Anyway, let's talk about what Facebook's shift in its algorithm actually meant. Now. I have to talk about this kind of in vague and high level ways because Facebook, like Google, is not transparent about its algorithms. Now we know a lot of stuff because of the leaked internal documents that came to light recently, but the company has never been super upfront with how much you know or how it determines the content you've seen on your news feed. Generally speaking, Facebook shifted its focus towards content that quote unquote drives engagement. That is, content that seems to inspire people to interact with that content in some way, like leaving a comment or clicking like or dislike, or sharing a post of Facebook really loves it when people share posts. The actual content of the post doesn't matter to Facebook. They are content agnostic when it comes to that. What matters to Facebook is that people are engaging with that content and thus spending more time on the platform. That yeah, that's what it really boils down to. If you're engaging in content, it means you're still on Facebook. You haven't left. And like I said in the beginning, at the end of the day, that's what it's all about. Facebook's just concerned with keeping as many people on the platform for as long as possible and that's it. So promoting material that gets people to spend more time on the platform just makes sense from that business perspective. Unfortunately, one of the crappy things about humans is that we tend to respond with or to outrage more readily than just about anything else. If something makes you mad, you're way more likely to act on that, and a lot of posts that quote unquote drive engagement are really all about outrage from different perspectives. Like a post could be about how a certain group of people are awful. Whether those people are awful or not doesn't matter. It's the fact that someone has made a post saying that. That's what matters. So the people who agree with the post, who might harbor strong negative feelings about the people who are mentioned in the post, they chime in others who sympathize with the people you singled out, maybe they are members of that group. They leap to the defense or they go on a counter attack against the person who posted it. There's enough outrage to go around, so you end up with a bunch of angry people waging battles across Facebook comments sections, and the algorithm, seeing that certain posts are generating a ton of quote unquote engagement, steps it up to promote those posts into more news feeds and thus spreads them further and wider. Because if the engagement is going up, it means more people are spending more time on Facebook, so there are more ads to serve. Now there's a lot going on here from a sociological standpoint, right. I mean, we've seen hates speech, racism, and misogyny spread like wildfire across Facebook. And while the battles in the comments rage, the algorithm just keeps stirring things up. We have to remember there are real world consequences to this online activity. People and vulnerable populations can be made to feel unsafe. That's a powerful and destructive thing. Folks can be driven to extremist views, joining echo chambers that reinforce beliefs and stereotypes that are outright harmful. People who are neither targeted nor pulled into groupthink might find themselves just distressed over the whole thing. It's pretty ugly stuff. And this is how misinformation and hate speech takes hold on Facebook. The algorithm, which is again content agnostic, recognizes that whatever is being posted is effective, and that's all that really matters, so we get an amplification chamber. Now, don't think anyone at Facebook necessarily saw this coming, at least not early on, or that the folks who worked on the algorithm intended it to spread hard, full material in a way that is alarmingly effective. I think they just didn't bank on human nature being what it is, or the fact that you have certain agents out there, Russian backed and Chinese backed agents who, once they figured out how to game the system, would flood Facebook with posts designed to drive engagement and spread misinformation and thus get caught up in this algorithm promotion and spread harmful messages. But the fact remains that this is what we're seeing play out. Facebook has attempted to address this with various content moderation strategies, but the company does so while also trying to walk a fine line and not trigger criticism from various sources such as the conservative right. The fear is that too much moderation will be perceived as censorship, and that the company is actively trying to silence conservative voices. Facebook has been the target of such criticism on multiple occasions, so the solution tends to be to use a very light touch when moderating content. Meanwhile, the messages continue to populate Facebook users news feeds. Now. I called this episode the evil Algorithm, And again, I don't necessarily think an algorithm is on its own evil, but I do think continuing to rely on an algorithm that is demonstrably causing harm is pretty darn evil. At the very least, it is unethical and irresponsible. However, you know, again, it's like at the very heart of Facebook's business strategy. And that was something that that Charlie was saying on Pod Save America that the very core of Facebook's purpose, like it's it's mission as far as a business is concerned, is at odds with you know, not causing harm, like that those two things can't really coexist because of just the way it has evolved from this site. That was meant to rank the attractiveness of female students at Harvard. Who would have thought that's such a thing could go so horribly wrong. Anyway, that's it for this episode. I really wanted to lay it out because I feel like when we talk about algorithms, we get so so lucy goosey with our words that it just becomes a like a blanket term that doesn't really mean anything. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best way to do that is over on Twitter. To handle for the show is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.