Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook Last month, the CEO approved a new initiative, codenamed Project Amplify. The effort, which hatched at an internal meeting in January, had a specific purpose. Use Facebook’s news feed, the site’s most important digital real estate, to tell people a positive story about social networks.
According to three people who knew about this effort, pushing Facebook-backed news items (some of which were created by the company) would improve the image of the user’s eyes. However, the move was sensitive because Facebook hadn’t previously positioned the news feed as a place to hone its reputation. One attendee said some executives at the meeting were shocked by the proposal.
Project Amplify has suspended a series of decisions Facebook made this year to actively reshape its image. Since its January meeting, the company has embarked on a multifaceted effort to change the story by distance. Zuckerberg From scandals, reduce outsiders’ access to internal data, fill in potentially negative reports about the content, and increase your own ads to showcase the brand.
This move will lead to a major shift in strategy. For years, Facebook has faced a crisis after a crisis over privacy, misinformation, and hate speech on the platform by publicly apologizing. Zuckerberg has been personally responsible for Russia’s intervention on the site during the 2016 presidential election and has loudly endorsed freedom of speech online. Facebook also promised transparency in how it operates.
However, we do not forgive the beating of criticisms of various issues such as racist speech and false information on vaccines. Dissatisfied Facebook employees are angry at leaking internal documents in opposition to their employers. Last week, The Wall Street Journal published an article based on such a document showing that Facebook knows about much of the harm it causes.
As a result, Facebook executives concluded that there was little way to calm criticism or gain support, and decided to continue the attack earlier this year, six people who did not reveal their identities for fear of retaliation. Current and former employees said.
“They know they won’t come to their defense, so they have to do that and say for themselves,” said Katie Harbus, a former Facebook public policy director. Said.
This change involves Facebook executives from marketing, communications, policy, and integrity teams. Alex Schultz, a 14-year company veteran who was appointed Chief Marketing Officer last year, has also influenced his efforts to reshape images, five people who worked with him said. But at least one of the decisions was driven by Zuckerberg and everything was approved by him, three people said.
Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne denied the company changed its approach.
“People deserve to know the steps we are taking to address the various issues our company faces — and we will share those steps widely,” he said. Said in a statement.
For years, Facebook executives have been plagued by the appearance of their company undergoing more scrutiny than Google and Twitter, current and former employees said. They said Facebook was apologized and noted that it provided access to internal data.
As a result, executives held a virtual meeting in January to break down more aggressive defense ideas, one attendee said. The group discussed using news feeds to promote positive news about the company and to place ads linked to favorable articles about Facebook. They also discussed how to define a professional Facebook story, the two participants said.
In the same month, the communications team discussed ways to weaken executive reconciliation in responding to the crisis and decided to reduce apologies, two people familiar with the plan said.
Zuckerberg, who was intertwined with policy issues, including the 2020 elections, also wanted to change his position as an innovator, people said. In January, the communications team distributed a document containing strategies to keep Zuckerberg away from the scandal. This is partly due to the focus on Facebook posts and media appearances on new products.
Information, a technology news site, was previously reported in this document.
The impact was immediate. On January 11, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, told Reuters that the attack on the US Capitol a week ago, not Zuckerberg, had little to do with Facebook. In July, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, said in a blog post when President Joe Biden said social networks were “killing people” by disseminating false information about COVID-19. He disputed the feature and pointed out that the White House overlooked the coronavirus. Vaccination goals.
“Facebook isn’t the reason why we didn’t reach this goal,” Rosen wrote.
Zuckerberg’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts changed quickly. Instead of addressing the corporate controversy, Zuckerberg’s post recently features a video of himself running across a lake with the American flag and a message about new virtual reality and hardware devices. (After this article was published explaining that Zuckerberg was on an electric surfboard, he wrote on Facebook that he was actually a “hydrofoil pumping on his feet.”)
Facebook has also begun to reduce the availability of data that allows scholars and journalists to study how the platform works. In April, the company spoke behind the team CrowdTangle, A tool that provides data on Facebook post engagement and popularity, which was split. While the tool still existed, the people who worked on the tool were transferred to other teams.
Part of the impetus came from Schultz, who was dissatisfied with news coverage using CrowdTangle data to show that Facebook was disseminating false information, the two people involved in the discussion said.
For scholars who depended on CrowdTangle, it was a blow. Cameron Hicky, a false alarm researcher at the National Conference on Citizens, a non-profit organization focused on civic participation, felt punished for the CrowdTangle team’s view of unfiltered engagement on Facebook. “I’m particularly angry,” he said.
Schultz argued that Facebook should publish its own information about the site’s most popular content, rather than providing access to tools like CrowdTangle, the two said. So in June, the company compiled a report on Facebook’s most viewed posts during the first three months of 2021.
However, Facebook did not publish the report. After the policy communications team found that the top-view link for that period was a news article with a headline suggesting that the doctor died after receiving it. COVID-19 (New Coronavirus Infection) According to an internal email reviewed by the New York Times, the company was worried that the vaccine might be accused of contributing to the vaccine’s hesitation.
According to the email, Schultz was part of a group that voted to shelve the documents the day before the report was to be published. He later posted an internal message about his role on Facebook, which was reviewed by the Times, “I’m interested in protecting the company’s reputation, but I’m also deeply interested in rigor and transparency.” Said.
Facebook has also worked to eradicate employee leaks. In July, the communications team closed comments on the internal forum used for the company-wide announcement. Read the post about the change, “Our one request: don’t leak”.
At the same time, Facebook has stepped up its marketing. Between Olympic This summer, the company paid for TV spots with the tagline “Change the game if you find each other” and advertised how to foster a community. Facebook spent a record $ 6.1 billion in marketing and sales in the first half of this year, up more than 8% year-on-year, according to a recent earnings report.
A few weeks later, when the company disabled Facebook accounts and group pages, it further reduced the ability of scholars to do research. New York University researcher. Researchers have created a feature for web browsers that can display the Facebook activity of users that 16,000 have agreed to use. The resulting data led to studies showing that misleading political advertising thrived on Facebook during the 2020 elections and that users were more involved in right-wing misinformation than many other types of content. I did.
In a blog post, Facebook said researchers at New York University violated rules regarding the collection of user data, citing the first privacy agreement signed with the Federal Trade Commission in 2012. Faith studies for the public good.
Laura Edelson, a senior researcher at New York University, said Facebook cut her off because her work received negative attention. “Some people on Facebook see the effects of these transparency efforts, and everything they see is bad PR,” she said.
The episode was further complicated by Facebook telling false information researchers that they had mistakenly provided incomplete data about user interactions and engagement for two years.
“Most of the modern life on Facebook cannot be considered unanalyzable by researchers,” said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford University.
In August, after Zuckerberg approved Project Amplify, the company tested changes in three cities in the United States, two people familiar with the effort said. The company used to use news feeds to promote its products and social objectives but did not openly promote active coverage of its company.
When testing began, Facebook used a system called Quick Promote to place articles about people and organizations using social networks in users’ news feeds, they said. People basically look at posts with the Facebook logo and links from company-published articles and websites, as well as third-party local news sites. One story pushed forward with “Facebook’s latest innovations in 2021” and discussed how to achieve “100% renewable energy for global operations.”
“This is a test of an information unit that is clearly marked as coming from Facebook,” Osborne added, adding that Project Amplify is “similar to the corporate responsibility initiatives found in other technologies and consumer products.” rice field.
Facebook’s rebellion against the unpleasant revelation didn’t give up without Zuckerberg. On Saturday, Nick Clegg, vice president of international affairs at the company, wrote a blog post condemning the premise of a journal survey. He said the idea that Facebook executives repeatedly ignored warnings about the problem was “just a mistake.”
“These stories contain a deliberate misunderstanding of what we are trying to do,” Craig said. He did not elaborate on what the misunderstanding was.
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