By Kevin Roose
- Nov. 30, 2018
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Hello, old friends! It's Kevin Roose, tech columnist and erstwhile newsletter writer.
I wanted to write an entire newsletter about the only news that mattered this past week: Knickers, the extremely large Australian cow (who is actually, as my colleague Daniel Victor reported, an extremely large Australian steer). But I've been told by my editors that this is "a tech newsletter" and "not the place for your livestock commentary," so I'll stick to talking about Silicon Valley.
Speaking of big overseas beefs (ha, sorry), Facebook had an exciting week in Europe. On Tuesday, officials from nine countries gathered in London to grill a Facebook policy executive, Richard Allan, about the company's data practices and its distribution of misinformation and false news. (The officials had wanted Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, to attend, but Mr. Zuckerberg apparently had other plans.)
Adding to the already dramatic proceedings was a trove of internal Facebook documents that were obtained by Damian Collins, the British lawmaker who convened the hearing. The documents stem from a California lawsuit against Facebook by the maker of an app called Six4Three, and they are under seal in the United States. (The bonkers story of how these documents were obtained — which involves a journalist, a hotel room raid and an app that let Facebook users search for photos of women in bikinis — might well be more interesting than the documents' contents.)
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Facebook's eventful week in Europe got me thinking about how to categorize the many, many problems the company has faced over the past several years.
They can be grouped in three buckets, I think, and it's worth spelling out what each of them is, because it might help illuminate the enormous complexity of Facebook's challenge in the coming years.
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The first bucket, as we all know, is filled with political problems. Facebook is widely mistrusted by lawmakers around the world, who are hostile to the company for a multitude of real and perceived sins: user privacy violations, monopolistic practices, claims of left-wing bias, corrosive effects on democracy. (On Thursday, Nicholas Confessore and Matthew Rosenberg reported that Sheryl Sandberg played a direct role in the company's aggressive response to criticism by the wealthy activist George Soros.)
So far, this hostility has manifested mostly in the form of a few shouty hearings and a lot of angry letters, and hasn't seriously impeded Facebook's ability to conduct its business. But it could produce real consequences in the coming months, as a Democratic House takes over in the United States and lawmakers in Europe and other countries start rolling out new rules around online ads, privacy and other core Facebook concerns.
The second bucket consists of perception problems — external P.R. crises, dwindling user satisfaction numbers and low employee morale.
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I'd argue that of these issues, the third really matters most. Tech companies live and die on their ability to attract and retain talented workers, and morale problems can quickly turn into business problems if they result in a less competitive work force.
We know that Facebook is already persona non grata among some computer science students, and that dissent inside the company is spilling into public view. If working for Facebook becomes the tech industry equivalent of working for Big Tobacco or Big Oil — and there's some evidence that it's trending that way — it's going to pose a long-term risk to the company's prospects.
The third bucket of Facebook problems are product problems — issues with Facebook's apps themselves. These include the way Facebook's News Feed algorithm puts a priority on sensational content and gives oxygen to viral hoaxes, the way products like WhatsApp can be used to broadcast misinformation over end-to-end encrypted channels, and the behaviors encouraged by the design of apps like Instagram, which has created a culture of bullying and harassment.
Product problems are the most worrisome ones for Facebook by a large margin, because they flow into other issues and they're the hardest to solve.
Making political problems go away is not rocket science — companies spend billions of dollars every year lobbying lawmakers to great effect. And perception problems, while painful in the short term, can be overcome over the long term, as news cycles move on and other companies' sins bump you out of the spotlight. (Exhibit A: Uber.)
But product problems can be excruciatingly hard to solve — especially when, as in Facebook's case, they live at the core of a lucrative business model.
I'm not the first to point out that many of Facebook's issues stem from its embrace of targeted advertising, which has made it an insanely profitable behemoth and created an unending series of headaches.
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I'm also not the first to point out that many of the worst examples of Facebook's influence around the world — the way it has facilitated genocide in Myanmar and Sri Lanka, led to deadly riots in India and Nigeria, and helped destabilize democracies around the world through the spread of disinformation and false news — are a direct result of the way its products are designed to maximize engagement.
To its credit, Facebook is trying to change some of this. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Zuckerberg published a long note about the company's efforts to reduce the spread of "borderline" content that almost but doesn't quite break its rules.
But it's not clear yet that Facebook can meaningfully change the engagement patterns on its apps — which are, after all, built on giving users more of what they want, even if what they want is hateful or misleading — without unraveling its business.
It's also not clear, from the reporting my colleagues have done over the last few months, that the company's leaders all agree that these product issues are problems at all. Some executives seem to believe that the real issues are image and perception, and that most of what's needed to correct them is a big, new hearts-and-minds campaign on Capitol Hill and a revamped media strategy.
So the big questions for Facebook now are: Can the company first acknowledge that it has product problems, in addition to political and perception problems? If it can agree on the product problems, how much money is Mr. Zuckerberg willing to lose in order to fix them? And how much damage will the company absorb in the meantime?
In other tech news of the week:
■ The most valuable company in the world is now … Microsoft? My colleague Steve Lohr explained how this happened: It's a story of a company's succeeding by embracing cloud computing, cutting some losing bets and loosening up its notoriously tight grip on its products. There is, it turns out, a benefit to being boring.
■ I'm obsessed with the article by Li Yuan, our China tech columnist, about the booming Chinese industry of data-tagging. It's a good preview of the kinds of jobs that might be created by artificial intelligence — in this case, cleaning up and labeling data and images so that they can be processed and fed into machine learning systems — even as other categories of work disappear.
■ There was a lovely, reflective column about surviving the next era of tech by Farhad Manjoo, my dearly departed colleague. (He's not dead, just dead to me — he's moving to the Opinion desk, and this was his last State of the Art column as a tech columnist.)
■ Finally, I enjoyed the piece from Peter Suderman in Opinion about Red Dead Redemption 2, the blockbuster video game of the year. Video games don't get nearly enough attention, considering the amount of money they earn and the cultural heft they have accumulated.
This is a great case for taking them more seriously, starting with Red Dead Redemption 2, which Mr. Suderman calls "a game about both making choices and living with them, about taking responsibility for how you've lived."
Kevin Roose writes a column called The Shift and is a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter here: @kevinroose.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 3, 2018, on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Breaking Down Facebook's 3 Problems. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe
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