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Facebook had evolved into a mire of clickbait video content produced by professionals, whose presence exacerbated the problem of making regular people feel like they didn’t need to post.
Instead Instagram trained the program to optimize for “number of posts made.” The new Instagram algorithm would show people whatever posts would inspire them to create more posts.
Influencers and brands had built growth into their business plans, and now, with this algorithm, it was gone. Instagram had an unsatisfying solution for them: they could pay for ads.
“If we’re going to get to a billion, that means seven hundred million people are going to join Instagram who have never experienced a ranked feed,”
“Reels” was the code name at Instagram, but everyone was casually calling the product Stories.
They were severely unprofitable after spending so much on data storage with Google. “How about a strategic investment?” he asked. “We don’t do that,” Rose said. “We buy, or we compete.”
He thought it was such a big change that everyone needed to be able to access it, or else it would be starved of the oxygen it needed to work.
Robby Stein, the product director in charge of Stories, would later compare the anxiety around the launch to that of a major life event, like getting married or having a child, where you have convinced yourself it’s a good thing and anticipated it for many months, but you know everything will be forever changed once you do it.
Spiegel never told them about the call, because, just like at Facebook, Spiegel and his cofounder held the majority of the voting control, rendering everyone else’s opinion irrelevant.
On the day of the launch of Stories in August 2016, the whole team arrived around 5 a.m. at Facebook’s headquarters, which were otherwise empty that early.
He explained that it was just a new form of communication, like email or text messaging, and that just because Snapchat invented it didn’t mean that other companies should avoid using the same opportunity.
day. It took a while to catch on in markets that Snapchat dominated, like the U.S. and Europe, but immediately took off in Brazil and India, where Snapchat’s product kept breaking with weaker connections
Chen flew out to spend time with Swift in her apartment, filming her with her cats, to subtly teach Instagrammers that Stories was about less polished moments.
Nate King was tickled, because most of the people buying a Baum from his shop did it for the prestige; he knew that Systrom would actually ride it.
“Facebook was like the big sister that wants to dress you up for the party but does not want you to be prettier than she is.” —FORMER INSTAGRAM EXECUTIVE
Earlier that year, as Instagram was building Stories, the online technology news site Gizmodo had written about a team of Facebook contractors who curated news into a “trending topics” module on the right side of the news feed. It was the only human-led editorial component of the social network. The blog cited anonymous Facebook contractors who said they routinely served up content from publishers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, but eschewed right-wing Fox News and Breitbart Gizmodo also reported that employees were openly asking Facebook management whether they had a
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It turned out that the public didn’t think of Instagram as part of Facebook’s controversy, or as part of Facebook, period. The brands were so separate that U.S. users saw Instagram as an escape from the big social network’s political debates and viral fluff. Most Instagram users had no idea that Facebook owned the app.
But now Facebook was under fire for what users read, and for the fact that the network’s ultra-personalization meant each user saw a slightly different version of reality.
With friends not posting as much about their personal lives, Facebook found a new kind of update to stuff into the news feed: any public post a friend commented on, even if it was from someone outside their network. That increased the amount of virality on Facebook, because a person didn’t have to choose to share something in order for a wider audience to see it. At the company they called this an “edge story,” because it happened at the edge of a user’s friend circle. Again, the move helped spread political debates on Facebook.
Facebook was indeed biased, not against conservatives, but in favor of showing people whatever would encourage them to spend more time on the social network.
It was how human nature was manipulated by Facebook’s algorithm, and how Facebook looked away, that got the company in trouble.
The most shareable content on Facebook was what made people emotional, especially if it triggered fear, shock, or joy. News organizations had been designing more clickable headlines ever since the social network became key to their distribution. But those news organizations were getting beaten by these new players, who had come up with an easier, more lucrative way to go viral—by making up stories that played on Americans’ hopes and fears, and therefore winning via the Facebook algorithm.
And, with Facebook’s guidance, his campaign had operated like a tech company, rapidly testing ads using Facebook’s software until they found the perfect messaging for various audiences.
Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests.
Clinton’s ads, on the other hand, weren’t about getting email addresses. They tended to promote her brand and philosophy. Her return on investment would be harder for Facebook’s system to measure and improve through software. Her campaign also barely used the Lookalike tool.
They were not lounging with Facebook on their couches so much as they were checking it at bus stops, in line for coffee, and on toilet seats. That was a problem if Facebook wanted a bigger chunk of the most valuable advertising market: television.
The videos that got the most traction were often low-quality, produced or repurposed by content farms, with networks of Facebook pages that would promote whatever they posted to make it go viral. There were few Facebook “creators” like the ones who had become famous building audiences on YouTube and Instagram.
The video site, which would eventually be called Facebook Watch, was a solid plan to take on television and YouTube, and solve Zuckerberg’s first problem.
But there was a second problem. People on Facebook were not posting updates like they used to. They were sharing links and making events, but they weren’t posting their original feelings and thoughts as often.
Maybe the problem was that all of his users had an alternative social network to visit—one that Facebook was promoting on its own site, and had been for years.
Now the public had four different Facebook-owned but separately branded places to post disappearing video to their friends, just like they could on Snapchat.
As The Verge wrote at the time, “borrowing Snapchat’s ideas is working out okay for Instagram, but for some reason Facebook’s direct attempts always feel a little off—and desperate.”
He was winning, but it felt like losing. It seemed as if, in the order of priorities, a win for Facebook the Social Network was more important than a win for Facebook the Company.
She was in two public disputes with other celebrities. After she split with her boyfriend, producer and DJ Calvin Harris, Swift revealed that she’d helped write his hit song with Rihanna, “This Is What You Came For.”
Swift wasn’t the only one feeling like her Instagram comments had been taken over by anonymous haters.
After Systrom had been convinced of the product opportunity, the team developed a tool to hide comments by filtering out a specific emoji or keyword, which anyone could use, not just Swift. It served as a major relief, especially to people with thousands or millions of followers, for whom it was untenable to delete comments one by one.
By December 2016, Instagram was letting users turn off comments for posts entirely if they wanted. Systrom’s willingness was in stark contrast to the attempts by Facebook and Twitter to err on the side of leaving content up, in an attempt to promote environments they said were neutral and open, but that in practice were rarely policed.
One of Zuckerberg’s least favorite criticisms of Facebook was that it created ideological echo chambers, in which people only engaged with the ideas they wanted to hear. Facebook had already funded research, in 2015, to show echo chambers were mathematically not their fault.
But if people chose not to interact with those they disagreed with, was that really Facebook’s doing? Their algorithm was just showing people what they demonstrated, through their own behavior, they wanted to see, enhancing their existing preferences.
But Instagram got a much more intense review than they’d anticipated. Zuckerberg explained that he had some major concerns, using a word that evoked violent imagery and alarm: “cannibalization.” The CEO wanted to know, if Instagram were to keep growing, would it start to eat at Facebook’s success? Wouldn’t it be valuable to know if Instagram was going to eventually siphon off attention that should be allocated to Facebook?
Facebook had accepted at least $100,000 in advertising revenue from fake users, acting on behalf of a foreign power, because of an easy-to-use advertising system that allowed anyone with a credit card to make a purchase.
Russia’s goal had been to infiltrate interest groups in the United States, and then make them angry. In the process, Stretch said, the posts had gone viral, reaching 126 million Americans.
it was just a sign that people in the country were starting to use Instagram for online shopping. They were posting photos of products for sale, then deleting the pictures once they were sold.
Another spam filter, which automatically suspended users who were posting a certain number of comments per minute, ended up blocking teens chatting with their friends, who had a higher frequency of activity on the app than Instagram had planned for when designing the automatic suspension to curtail spam.
That year, they had helped disarm a major competitor, Snapchat, which had gone public in March as Snap Inc. Snap shares had declined, losing almost half their value, in part on concerns that the company wouldn’t be able to compete with Instagram after the Stories launch.
Looking at the chart years into the future, if Instagram kept growing and kept stealing users’ time away from Facebook, Facebook’s growth could go to zero or, even worse, it could lose users. Because Facebook’s average revenue per user was so much higher, any minutes spent on Instagram instead of Facebook would be bad for the company’s profitability, he argued.
“The total pie is getting bigger.” It wasn’t just Instagram versus Facebook. It was all of these Facebook properties versus every other choice in the world, like watching television or using Snapchat or sleeping.
He asked Systrom to build a prominent link within the Instagram app to send his users to Facebook. And alongside the Facebook news feed, in the navigation to all of the social network’s other properties, like groups and events, Zuckerberg removed the link to Instagram.
The new feed order—which prioritized users’ closest relationships instead of the newest posts—meant influencers and businesses could no longer grow their followings by simply posting often.
They pieced together that the new algorithm weighted a post higher if other people started talking about it right away, with a multiple-word comment, which was better than just a heart or smiley-face emoji.
