Part of this was Zuckerberg outright lying to everyone about video's impact. I was involved in a newspaper doing this and we did a big push to video because FB told us it got more impact. Actually digging into the numbers showed this wasn't true, or if it was then people weren't clicking through the video to somewhere we could serve ads to them. It ended up losing us money and diverting time and effort when it was sorely needed elsewhere.
> Part of this was Zuckerberg outright lying to everyone about video's impact.
Perhaps I'm missing some important aspect, but what would be the benefit of lying about this? How would serving video that didn't promote engagement help FB at all? Just more storage and bandwidth without increased opportunity to serve an ad -- backwards from how I understand FB's model.
People do say something false for a believed gain all the time. But usually when I hear something false it's a misunderstanding or misspeaking. So based on my (relatively naïve) model of how FB works as a business, "lying" doesn't seem like the right word here.
they've admitted to knowingly reporting impossible metrics, which is lying as far as i'm concerned.
these specific metrics were used to indicate to business accounts what kind of content was appreciated, and cited in executive keynotes, essentially demanding an internet-wide "pivot to video".
one lawsuit has already settled with a payout and it seems like a second one is ongoing.
i believe the intent was that video embeds are watched in the feed, whereas articles are more often links out.
it was incredibly destructive as nearly every news outfit cited this as the motivation for gutting their investigations and writing staff.
There are many reasons why Facebook would want to push videos at the time. There was probably a strategy shift to video at the board level then it trickled down into this.
Facebook gets paid for showing ads and videos were playing automatically on hover. It looks like more engagement but the call to actions is lower (no one clicks on a link).
Is this related to what almost killed CollegeHumor/Dropout? IIRC facebook were lying to them about how well their facebook videos were performing, so they hired a large team based on that ad revenue. When them + advertisers found out that facebook were lying, they had to let go almost everyone apart from a skeleton crew.
Yes, I believe so. We had less staff issues, we tested the waters before going all-in, but it was still a diversion of effort and emphasis for zero gain (for us - I believe Meta did well from it).
Look, I agree that this was a terrible, terrible situation that caused a _lot_ of pain for publishers (and contributed to many outlets becomingly meaningfully worse for me).
That being said, this was a bug in the code. All of us write bugs, and so we should maybe not be as harsh to other people who do. Was it a convenient bug? Yes it was, it helped push a narrative around video and provided more videos for people on FB. Was that intentional? Almost certainly not, although they should've fixed it much, much quicker.
At facebook's size and for the duration that lie was told, no, that's inexcusable.
That's a knew or should have know territory - they were pushing a new feature, they lied about the impact of the new feature, they changed the industry around it and wasted billions of dollars. Later this was called "a bug" - seems beyond convenient for facebook when you know, double checking that type of thing is usually a big deal for advertisers.
When this happened, Facebook was a much, much smaller company. They made the decision around pushing videos before this code was written, because of the engagement of videos on Facebook and Instagram.
Source: I was there, and tangentially involved in this
