I think that everybody in our society is getting attuned to strategic communication in a way that was not happening before social media. So today, we're here with Sarah Fryer. Sarah, as you know, with the NFX podcast, we're just looking to talk with the smartest people we know about things they are seeing that no one else is seeing.
And as founders and investors ourselves, and that affects, we've tried to reinvent industries, and we've seen others do the same with this mindset of reinvention and seeing things differently. And we think that that's sort of the DNA of most great startup founders is seeing things differently. So we're looking for that unusual thought. We're looking for descending and contrarian opinions and just keeping things straight up.
So, hopefully, this is something that can help them on their way to navigate properly. By listening to these types of podcasts. So let's just jump in. So you've been covering your journalists covering social media from Bloomberg, and you've specifically got this good reputation for asking really hard questions. Of Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and whatnot. And, you know, you've you've written this book, no filter about Instagram that came out earlier this year.
And I'd love to know why did you start focusing on social media and these big companies, and what about them attracted you to take your creativity, your life's energies, and focus on this topic? And why is this so important? Well, I think that there's so much less transparency for businesses than there is for public sector.
So as a journalist, I felt like there was a huge to be the person that sheds light on these products which are now becoming part of our societal infrastructure even more in some cases than our governments and with leaders who are not elected who are not really beholden to their users except for via growth.
And so I think that it's my job to interrogate the full picture of an app's effect on our world, not just how successful is it from the sense of users and revenue and Pete titian, but how successful is it at resonating with people and solving their problems and you're really creating a product that matters, and are they trying to be forces for good?
And so I think that the social media story is so interesting because these are products that really started as things of the democratizing effect for their users where anyone could be a public or anyone could have a voice and that voice could be amplified across borders, across ideas, and and front groups. And what has happened is, yes, that has occurred.
People have been able to use social media to speak truth to power, to get their businesses started, to establish their personal brands, to demonstrate what's happening in their lives, and on the most basic level, keep in touch with friends and family. But because of the lack of barrier to entry and because it's so easy to have a voice, there are also some dark sides that have come about.
And and I think that one big question that I have interrogated in my reporting, these platforms have this position of neutrality. They say we don't really have an opinion about what is good content or bad content. We're really just trying to service neutral platforms for humanity. We're just trying to reflect humanity.
But in reality, what they end up having a bias towards is the content that leads to more growth, more engagement, more time spent on their platforms, which is not necessarily a healthy effect.
And so I think that I see it as my job to uncover the mechanisms of these products so that we as consumers of them can under stand or people even who are building businesses modeling off of this or trying to fill holes in our technology ecosystem can see where the blind spot are and why this pressure towards growth and engagement can actually be quite damaging for the companies from a reputation standpoint and the appeal they have with users.
Sarah, what I'm hearing is that it might back us up a little bit. Is that the United States social structure based on the 4th state. The 1st estate's the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judicial branch, and the 4th estate is the press, and the press had traditionally been controlled by 30 families with newspapers and TV stations. There was a limited number of TV stations, a limited number of newspapers, These people were all educated. They were all sort of reasonable.
They were you could have dinner with them. They kind of kept the editors under control, and there was a lot of sort of cultural and social guardrails on how the media was generated and propagated around the the society. And and for a while, it seemed to work pretty well. This technology of the internet comes along, which fundamentally many to many. So anybody can broadcast to anybody now for 0 marginal costs. You don't even need to print paper.
You don't need to have a broad cast radio station that costs a lot of money to build. So anyone can say anything to anyone, and chaos is broken loose. And in the midst of this natural technological evolution. You have these companies pop up with these network effects, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and They are now the arbiters and the links between everyone talking to each other.
And instead of them doing what the old media, the old 4th estate used to do, which was try to be reasonable, to try to focus on the truth. These people say, that's not our job. Our job is to be a technology platform. Let the internet do what the internet does, which is let everyone communicate to everyone Is that where we sit today?
Well, I think I would take it a step further, which is it's not just that these platforms are the pipes for the internets information, it's that they are the arbiters of what information gets heard and doesn't. And they are rewarding certain kinds of content as opposed to other kinds of content and giving us incentives to produce in a certain way. So one thing I would point to is the difference between Instagram and Facebook and Twitter.
Instagram is more of a broadcast network without resharing. There's no way to share someone else's post on your profile. Well, what that does is it makes Instagram the ultimate personal branding tool? Because if you go to someone's Instagram page, you see a collection of things that they have created. And in the follower count at the top, it has become this sort of benchmark for cultural relevance.
And the filters that Instagram started with are things that give us permission to present our lives as more polished and beautiful than they actually are. And the lack of hyperlinks means that it's not a place where we're sharing news as much. So I guess the point I'm trying to make is the actual structure of these platforms of things that they reward, change our behavior, change what we're putting out there, and amplify certain kinds of content over other kinds of content, reward certain kinds.
Got it. So the old 4th estate would arbitrate based on accuracy or truth or their own opinion. And Facebook is saying, in Instagram, these guys, we're not doing any of that.
We're just a technology What you're saying, which is what other people aren't really recognizing, is that they are actually influencing what the content is in other ways that just didn't exist before because the technologies of the past paper and broadcast, TV, and radio didn't allow for these types of manipulation, these types of guiding approaches to the product development. And so they are influencing.
They are being the arbiters of what is seen, but they're doing it in ways that we're unfamiliar with, and so both the government and most of the press doesn't really understand how that's working. And, therefore, they should be held to task because they are arbiting things when they're saying not. Is that the idea?
We need to think about it in terms of the incentives that are provided to people on these platforms because what we talked about a lot, I think you've heard of people criticize the platforms for addicting us or drawing us in caring about the time we spend there and, you know, taking away from hanging up each other. That actually is not, I think, the biggest thing that I've been thinking about. I'm really thinking about what do these platforms reward?
Are the things that these platforms reward changing our behavior? And I think it's very clear that it is because if you look at Facebook, Facebook rewards content that gets reactions, right, whether that's likes, comments, shares. Congratulations. Yeah. Exactly. And the content that gets reaction is content that is surprising.
Beller it's surprising in a positive way, like someone's having a baby or surprising in a negative way, like something makes you very afraid or very angry about our current political system and those kinds of things that's spark emotion that spark a reaction are the kinds of things that are leading to polarization in our society and the spread of misinformation, if you were to write a post on Facebook telling people that vaccines are safe and medically approved, would it get viral shares?
Probably not because that's common knowledge. That's, like, pretty much accepted medical practice. Right? Now. But if you post something with an emotional appeal saying that vaccines are gonna kill you, that's gonna shock Pete, and they're gonna wanna share that and make sure that everyone else knows to avoid these scary vaccines. So I I think that how we've seen messaging Adapt and what the companies are trying to do now is say, okay.
If we wanna see ourselves as neutral platforms, Is there a line? Like, is there a place where we need to come in and say, okay. We actually do have a responsibility to not recommend anti vaxx group to Pete. Those growing pains are happening right now. Those are the the questions they're trying to answer. Right. If they should go back and do what the old 4th estate used to do, which is to actually arbiter the content versus changing the incentive. So let me ask you this.
Is this different materially from what we're seeing with cable technology or with newspaper technology. Because didn't Rupert Murdoch come into Australia and the UK press and put out pictures of essentially nude Morgan, and he would take the papers that he would buy, and he would make them much more shocking, much more salacious and therefore, he would drive up, revenues and readership and then take that money to buy more newspapers and more TV stations.
And this is essentially how he built Fox isn't CNN and MSNBC and Fox News and all of the news channels essentially going down this road as well to get more viewers by saying more and more shocking things, isn't this the nature of it? Isn't this what Hollywood did with violence? And they're always pushing it. Isn't it always profitable to push the edge? It is always profitable to push the edge.
And the companies that are generating our platforms for social media are really taking that to the next level, and they're making it more rapid, more accessible for you to be angry. And they're building upon it with recommendation algorithms. Right? So if you tune Flint Fox, you'll probably get some angry rants about the state of things. That's how they make their money.
If you go to Facebook, not only will you get that, you'll get recommendations to dive deeper into the issue to become further immersed in it, to fill your feed with it every day. And it's the tension economy. The attention economy turning our discourse into an entertainment product. And it's never been done at this scale before. If you think of Instagram Instagram has more than 1,000,000,000 users. Millions of those users have an audience equivalent to the New York James, just themselves.
And they are essentially running their own mini media businesses, mini 10 businesses. And so it's not an either or not saying they're social media and then there's traditional media. All media is being influenced by the social platforms. In fact, Fox is the most popular news network on Facebook specifically because of the way they promote content. And it it just is this infinitely But Fox is by far the most popular news network on cable as well. Right.
It's this appealing to that which is shareable, that which will spark your interest. You're right. It's always been happening in media, but it's never happened at the scale. Correct. Okay. So in 1800, most newspapers were Beller journalism like a Fox or an MSNBC. And eventually, what happened was the advertisers said, well, I'm not gonna advertise in your Beller journal because then I'll piss off half of my customers. So I will only advertise a newspapers that show a balanced approach.
And that's what really brought the newspapers in line, you know, between 1900 and, you know, Fox. And so we got used to that. We all kinda grew up with that. That was the history just 4 we were born or while we were being born. And now we're going kinda backwards, but we're going backwards with this atom bomb of technology, which is the many to many internet, 0 marginal cost so you're taking they're just taking it.
They're just 10x ing what was going on before, but this is sort of the nature of media. It's human nature to click on something that's more salacious. And now we just got a bigger tool, which makes it that much more dangerous. That's what I'm hearing. Well, it's also integrating into our social lives. And and I think that the big difference that I would give you between social networks and news networks. When you are going to news networks, you know what you are consuming.
You're I need to look up what happened on the news today. You're in that mode of receiving the news and thinking about it critically. When you're scrolling through Facebook, when you're scrolling through Instagram, you are in a passive consumption mode where you just want to be fed anything that will entertain you at that Morgan.
And you're not likely to actually click on a lot of the news links you see because you're not necessarily seeking out the information that you're given, you're not thinking about it as critically. I mean, I think about this, of course, also happens in the TV world. I think about growing up and my mom watching daytime television and telling me, oh, did you know that walnuts are good for your brain? And that's something that never would have, like, thought to look up.
There was no Google back then, so I just kind of accepted it. And now I realized, like, that's just daytime TV bullshit. But I think that the same thing happens with social platforms. So it's interesting.
I thought you were gonna make a different point, which was that the difference between the old technologies was that I would assume the newspaper or the TV by myself or maybe with a couple family members, but this social media platform now has intermix all of this conversation with my 100, my 400, my 2000 people that I know and interact with, and that that's fundamentally different somehow.
No. I don't think necessarily that's true because when you were reading the news before the Internet, you would, of course, discuss it with your friends and family and your church and your office or whatever, you know, group you Beller to, your people at your gym, this is from because we are in a mode of consuming that which entertains us and updates us on our friends and family, and then we also get this information filtered through those people who we try so much.
If you get information from your uncle, you're more likely to trust it than if you Pete it from a third party source because you love your uncle. Maybe you love your uncle. I would argue that the passivity of a TV is actually a little bit more than the passivity of the internet scrolling. What, on average, people watch 4.6 hours of TV a day on average in the United States, like, 20 years ago, and now it's down to 4.2. It hasn't hardly budged.
People are just sitting there with the screen on just passively absorbing whatever's on. And what you're saying is they're doing it a little bit with this stream now as well. It's just it's getting attached to brands like your uncle or your mom that have a much deeper emotional impact on you.
And and I guess I would argue that if I make a comment on my sister's post about something instead of five or six people at the gym being an earshot of my comment, I have 200 people who might read that comment. So like you said, it's sort of this Adam mom. It's this it's taking it to a whole another level.
Beyond that, if you comment on your sister's post, say your sister is starting to get a little bit into the conspiracy theories and you're worried about her and you're posting on her face to say you should read this link because this is not actually true. Your comments on her post is something that Facebook sees as a engagement signal, which is more likely to distribute her posts into other people's feeds. So even the argument about a is something that Facebook approves of and will amplify.
Got it. So acrimony and dissonance is actually a positive in this environment then it gets amplified much much as it doesn't cable, but you're saying it's just a 10 x factor. So a 100 years from now, when we look back on this phase, What do you think we're gonna say about it? What was happening right now? What was the major underlying thing that was happening? I think that everybody in our society is getting attuned to strategic communication in a way that was not happening before social media.
Whereas, you know, you talk about how Rupert Murdoch really invented this kind of salacious content as a means of generating business in the early days of News Corp, we all now understand how to make content that gets shared and not just that if we're on Instagram, we know how to take photos of ourself Flint the right angles or with the right caption. We know what's Instagramable on Facebook.
We know what kind of thing is likely to be shared, and our communication overall is becoming so much more strategic as a society. And that has big implications for how we interact with 1 another, how we come to consensus about how to make change in the world if we do it all. I think that the training of humanity on the kind of metrics that Facebook rewards is influencing the behavior of our society. Right. So when you say strategic communications, we also call it self conscious communication?
Self conscious is another way to put it. Every time you post explicitly or or sort of subconsciously, you have a sense of how that post will be consumed by people. It's this level of self consciousness that is really just being measured all the time. We can see this post got x amount of likes and this post didn't, I need to post more stuff like that if I want to have an impact. It's interesting that when thinking about this third eye Right?
So I could have a conversation with you, but then there's also this third eye presence, which is, oh, people are gonna be listening or judging or watching what we're doing, and they're gonna be having an interpretation. So the third eye is much more present with this media than it was with the old technology. Interesting. It is, but at the same time, it's one of those things that if you are building a company, you have to think about what metrics you're giving your users.
The gamification at the time of the rise of these platforms, you had to give people a little bit of score in order to keep them interested. Right? You could grow your friend count, grow your followers, sign in times a day, these engagement tactic were good for building sustainable businesses and growing businesses and affecting that network effect.
And I think that it's really important in the early days of a company to think about what are you measuring, what are you going towards, and what are you giving your users as signals of their success with the product because whatever you measure people buy, that's what will affect their behavior. So for example, on YouTube, we all can see that YouTube puts ads in things at a certain minute mark.
So if you're trying to make money off of YouTube, we need to post longer video which is why we've seen a shift in YouTube from, like, gangnam style short video content to long common from beauty bloggers or video game bloggers, people who do reaction videos to TV shows, you're seeing a lot more longer content where you can slot in more ads and get favored in the algorithm. Got it.
And so if you're a early stage startup founder, as you're saying, you need to think about this, but aren't you just in a mathematical struggle for survival at that point? You're trying to balance your employees and your venture financing and your growth rates and your retention rates.
And if you don't do the best you can to increase your growth and increase your retention, you might not survive and the person who's willing to do something to increase their growth and retention, they might survive. So at the early stages, I can see why early stage founders like, dude, I just need to get this thing growing and get people on here and and exist, you know, because there's, you know, 1200 social media venture backed companies a year.
And, you know, in the last 9 years since Snap, there's been maybe, what, 3 successes out of the all of those. It's very difficult to build something. I would challenge founders to go against the conventional wisdom, though, because I think if you measure differently, you may be surprised by what hole you fill in consumer technology.
So to take Instagram as an example, they were heavily pushed to do resharing on Instagram, how better to increase engagement for this new app than let people share each other's content. James them very easy for them. They don't have to go out and create their own content. They can just borrow content from others. Well, the Instagram founders resisted that. They thought, well, maybe that would be good.
For our engagement metrics, but I don't think that it would be good for what people get out of our platform because we want to be a place where photographers and artists and musicians, and celebrities can be happy to share. And if someone could just share their content immediately on their own platforms, then it wouldn't be a special to follow them. And they turned out to be right. That's the thing that made Instagram the ultimate personal branding tool, the fact that there's no resharing.
So, again, look at Snapchat. Snapchat let people send messages that disappear. Up until that point, it made sense to just collect as much data on your users as possible because that was the advertising engine. Right? That was how you figured out what people liked and built the advertising model around them. Well, Snapchat thought that's dumb because people have so much pressure to create stuff that can be consumed by others. They were seeing what was happening with Instagram.
The immense amount of polish and curation that went into every Instagram post, and they thought, no. We wanna solve a different problem. We wanna let people post things that disappear. We'll figure out the revenue stuff later. And everyone thought that was insane, but it turned out to be a very success full business fulfilling a a consumer need. So I think that this conventional wisdom about what growth should like what we should measure.
Some of the companies that are most successful at breaking through are the ones that think of things differently. I get it. I like it. And you've been getting inside the minds of these big founders as and looking at some of the smaller platforms as well. Have you seen any patterns that define them as people or their thinking or any insight into the DNA of these folks?
I think one of the things I found very interesting in the early days of Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat is this idea of simplicity, solving a problem for users in a very simple way, even in a constricted way that with constraint there can come creativity. So Twitter, with its short messaging service, there was a lot of constraint, a 140 characters. You couldn't post any more than that. But in that short, easy mode of communication, people were almost free to do something new.
Same thing with Instagram. You had post a square photo. That was considered by a lot of people to be very strange. Why would you post it? That's not even something that photographer think is a good shape for a photo. Photographers like all the rule of thirds. They like their photos do your rectangular for the most part. That was the conventional wisdom. They said, no. We want it to be nostalgic like a Polaroid. And they made their photos square.
It also presented pretty well on the iPhone screen. So I think that the simplicity in the early days is something that can really solve problems for people. People forget that Facebook started out as an incredibly simple network. It was just your profile and you had a wall that people could post on. And people escaped to Facebook from my space because my space was really busy.
They were the full of all this HTML design, people putting music on their pages, now says that we're crazy shapes and colors and all sorts of loud fonts. Facebook was like, no. We're just this simple text network, and it wasn't until later that they introduced photos and events and groups and things like that. So I think that that really struck me as interesting.
That these founders were able to think very reductionally, very reductionist, very small, very niche, very focused, right, from the beginning. I think a technology that there's a tendency to want to solve the most complicated problem. Right? Like, what is a journey that no smart person has ever gone on before? Can I conquer it? But that's not actually necessarily what will win the hearts and minds of consumers.
Right. So I remember, as Steve Jobs said, I'll give you nothing for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I'll give you anything, everything for simplicity on the other side of complexity. When you have used your giant brain to think through all the complexity, then you've reduced it down to something incredibly simple. And these founders, you're saying we're able to do that. Yeah. I think that that's, of course, their products all become a lot more complicated over time.
And part of that is some might even argue degrading the experience and making it more confusing for consumers. But once you have the network, then do that a little bit. We've got the social dilemma. We've got your book. We've got so many people writing papers and thinking and wringing their hands about the situation we're in with social media and the internet and upcoming election and that sort of thing. Pete, there's just a few people and just a few platforms that are in the middle of this.
Right? There's Zuckerberg and the whoever runs the algorithm on Facebook, right, there's whoever's running product at, Instagram. There's whoever's running the algorithm and the CEO of YouTube, but it's, like, call it twelve people. They're at the center of all this challenge that we have. Is anyone talking to them that you know of? Sitting them down and saying, have you really thought this through?
I mean, of course, you were talking earlier about how everyone in the early days of their company is just in a struggle for vival?
Well, if you talk to a Mark Zuckerberg or someone in his level of business, you will find that he still feels like Facebook is an underdog even though Facebook has more than 3,000,000,000 users across all of its properties, he has this mentality still of being under attack, something that could fade at any moment that you need to be really defensive around And so I think when these founders are questioned about their tactics or
their philosophies, often the response you get is we're just trying to survive, which is is really kind of baffling when you think about how big they are maybe they could invest a little bit more in content moderation or maybe they could invest a little bit more in actually finding the dark sides of their platforms, or maybe they could invest a little bit more in actually paying a higher wage to the contractors they employ etcetera, but I think that they are, you know, inherently capitalistic.
So I think that's what got into this Flint, and it's very difficult to take somebody out of that conquering mode and say, okay. Now you have to be good stewards of your users. Instead of growing, how about Beller. Would we characterize them as capitalistic? I mean, you know, I think Chan Zuckerberg's giving away all their money. It's not about the money. It's about winning and about not losing, isn't it? I mean, it's not about capitalists? Well, when I say capitalist, I mean, growth.
I mean, having something bigger than anyone else has. Right. But that's but I I don't want to equate that with Zuckerberg who's making more money off political ads. Like, the amount of money they make off political ads is de minimis. Like, it's just a pain in their ass. It's not about making more money. I don't really dislike all that discussion in the press and online about, oh, they're just making money off this. Nah. They're not really.
It's just de minimis, and they don't really care about that money because, you know, Zuckerberg's worth whatever he is. A 100,000,000,000. Okay. Let's say goes on to 50. I mean, it doesn't matter. They don't care about the money as much as they care about the quarter over quarter growth. They care about winning and not losing.
And that's such an interesting insight that they, at this point, I don't know what's Facebook's market cap, 700,000,000,000, but it's the 5th most valuable company in the world, and he's still thinking we're just trying to survive. Isn't that interesting? I mean, just the mentality. It really is. And I think that the people who work there on a micro level are also thinking, how do I get my numbers up next quarter? Because that's how I get my bonus. That's how I pay off my mortgage.
That's how I get promoted. That's how I get the affection and love of people I respect who I work with here at Facebook. They're just humans. They just wanna be liked by the people that they like. Just like we wanna be like, we want more followers so we can tell that people like us. This space bookization of human thought We all have we all have this growth mentality now.
But isn't this the constant struggle of the pack animal homo sapien that we're all trying to figure out where we fit in the pack and we don't wanna be behind and we wanna be liked. And, I mean, isn't this just another technology which is showing us our own sides?
Well, I think that it just indicates that there are fundamental flaws in our measure of success that is large and influential and profitable as Facebook has grown that there's a lot of uncertainty about their role in society and whether they should have that power. And yet they keep growing. It's almost paradoxical. Like, people talk about Facebook as a very troubled company, and yet if you look at the numbers, all the numbers point to a grand success.
Does that mean there's something wrong with our definition of success, or does that mean that we are criticizing the Facebook unnecessarily I don't think the latter is true because I think, like I said, in the beginning of our conversation, these corporations now have infrastructure in our society. They need to have their power prudentized in order to be serving their users in a way that's in the user's interest.
I was remarking on how Mark Zuckerberg has had this transformation as person, from person that may or may not be accurately portrayed in the social network movie, from that sort of a product person to then a a CEO where he understood that it was Facebook Morgan he could buy Instagram, and he could buy WhatsApp, and now it's sort of social media corporations.
We became a CEO rather than a product person, and yet there seems to be another transformation, a personal transformation that needs to take place for this person, toward a state's person, a state someone who understands the needs of the many and the many stakeholders, is that perhaps the transformation your request from these people in the same way that if you met the heads of the Washington Post or the LA James or the
Chicago tribune 20 years ago, you would see that they were essentially states Pete. They had an understanding and a balance between their own profits, their own distribution, and then the public good, and that that seems to be missing from the people who are currently running these corporations. Is that maybe something you're saying? I think that's part of it, but I do think that Facebook has become a lot more political, and it's not always done in the user's interest. Right?
Facebook has has tried to have equal opportunity training for political leaders who use their platform. Well, one consequence of that is they end up training training dictators who use Facebook against their citizens. Right? So it's not just about being political. It's about having ability to not just say we need to get bigger and bigger and bigger, but we need to look back on what we did and think how could it be better Like, we need to be good stewards of the power we already have.
And so I think that that takes a lot of willingness to admit wrongdoing or to just admit blind spots and say, listen, we found this. You know, we're gonna be transparent about it. And here's how we're going to address it. But I also think it's on consumers to understand how these products work because if we understand the baked in incentives.
If we understand the egos at play, the competitive landscape, the things that they are rewarding in their customers, but also in their employees, then we can figure out what part we should play in that world, like, how we can use it in a healthy manner. Right.
So is there some part of this argument where we're saying that consumers, all of us, as individuals, need to take more responsibility for how we interact with these tools that are now existing, that they didn't exist 20 years ago, and now they do, and that we ourselves have to add seat Beller to cars we have to figure out how to add the effect of same seat belts to this type of technology. Is that part of it?
Or do we need to be a little bit more elitist and say, here's how you people should do it. Or do we just let people run with the tools? I know. Well, running with the tools, the tools have been designed over the last, I guess, maybe 15, 16 years to get us to share more easily and quickly and to reduce the barriers to sharing and engaging. Think about something like Facebook reactions. It takes almost no effort to put your little angry face on a Facebook post.
And that gives Facebook the engagement. It takes almost no effort to share somebody's content. And so there have been economic experiments around getting users to think a little bit more. Instagram has done this with bullying comment. If people call each other savory things, Instagram will have a little pop up saying, are you sure you want to tell that to this person? And then they often don't. It's just that little signal for people that maybe you shouldn't. Maybe it's not worth it.
And I think that there's a lot of human nature into this. I think for instance, when Donald Trump was diagnosed with COVID, you saw a lot of tweets from people saying, great. And then deleting those tweets a few minutes later. So I think maybe similar to stop signs. We need to don't saw people from driving, but let them know what they're doing. Got it. So over time, we evolved rules of the road.
Stop lights, double yellow lines, not single yellow lines, etcetera, to help make the whole technology of cars more safe And that's what these platforms should be doing now.
And maybe it would be better if they were transparent about the fact that they wanted to do that, that they saw themselves as stewards Morgan states Pete, and they were at least making an effort to help ameliorate some of the negative consequences that are pretty apparent to everyone about what they're doing, but they're doing that. So if you were Zuckerberg, what were you'd be doing? If you were suddenly the CEO of Facebook Inc corp, what are some of the things you would do?
1st of all, I would be proactively searching for content that was harmful instead of waiting for users to report it. They are doing that with artificial intelligence But as we know, that is no placement for human judgment, I think that they are afraid to apply human judgment to that content because they don't want to be, a publisher under the 2nd 2 30 rules, the communication CAC, which could then make them liable for that content.
But I think that they already are having a human impact on the content. They already are influencing what we Pete. So they can at least try to know more about what's happening on their own platforms. When I talk with employees at Instagram, they tell me that essentially, they're playing whackable. They'll find a spate of violent content or drugs for sale or extremist groups cropping up on Instagram, human trafficking, pornography, etcetera, they will delete the hashtag.
They'll delete a few accounts, and it'll come right back up. So I think this is stemic problems are ones that they need to start looking at, not just the case by case. Okay. Now we're banning QAnon. Now we're banning anti back Like, well, what about the systemic issues that lead us to these problems? And can you start to think about the incentives in your product for people? I think some of the things that Facebook is doing their good.
They now have these election voter guides where you can go to get verified information on the election from the State Port of Lexus officials. They now have these COVID guides, and they're gonna soon have a climate 1. I think that that is the kind of thing that they could do more of. But again, that doesn't solve the problem of the passive scroller absorbing information without looking into it more. Few people are going to click on that, tell me more link. Right.
Yeah. I mean, it does sound as if you're asking them to use their own judgment a little bit more in terms of the and developing more systems, whether it's AI or, you know, human in the loop AI to more aggressively police content, much like a television or a newspaper would in the past, just at a much larger scale because of the scale of this thing. Yeah. Just have more transparency for users about the great equalizer in terms of our voices, but also in terms of content sources.
If you see something from NPR, it looks the same as fthepolice.com. It's all looks the same on Facebook. And so think that the signals that people are getting are that this content is equally as trustworthy. Right. Because of Facebook. Facebook is repackaging it. Mhmm. I know there's a lot of talk about all this, but what are people not talking about that they should be talking about. Is there a cover story that you would write that people won't let you write?
I don't think there any covers people won't let me write but let me say one story I've been meaning to do for a long time is from an antitrust perspective, the amount of control that Facebook and Instagram have over small businesses.
It's pretty incredible how many businesses exist almost exclusively on Instagram and Facebook, especially in COVID James, if you are an artist, if you are a baker, if you are a, you know, a makeup artist or a fitness instructor or an actor your whole livelihood is tied to your account. And what has happened as Facebook does a lot of algorithmic moderation of content without actually having human involvement in the results. A lot of people are banned.
Have their accounts taken down with no recourse. There's no customer service. There's no way for them to get help to get their accounts back, and they can put ports in, but they likely won't get seen by a human. And so every day I get messages from people saying my account's gone down. I can't get back. This is my whole livelihood. And a lot of those are I mean, I don't have the ability to verify. Okay. You did have 3,000,000 followers on Instagram. Okay. This was your whole business.
I've gone down that rabbit hole with a few people. It's also hard to know if they're trying to prank me and say, really want this handled because some Instagram hills are super valuable. I think that the onus is on Facebook and Instagram, you know, if they want to help their users not just grow businesses, but have some sort of infrastructure for maintaining them. I think that would be something worth talking about.
It's interesting because dependency that so many people now have on this center as headquarters for their livelihood means that we're still at the very early days of that. Right? I mean, it's 8 years in, let's say, and over time, they will develop software and algorithms and approaches to extract more and more of that value out of each of those individuals. Why wouldn't they?
Sort of a lot of the network effects that they've been able to build are gonna allow them to sort of capture people because they won't be able to get any value from any other form as much as they can from this one. And then slowly, little by little, charged them more and more. Like, they did, you know, 10 years ago, they had the platform. They allowed people to get viral on the platform, is good, but then they started charging everyone for that traffic.
And now the virality's gone away and all the revenue has now moved into their coffers. So the same thing is gonna happen with these individual businesses as well. And that hasn't even started yet because we're still in the very early days. Right now, it's the early days where the the accounts just go down. It's, like, fairly Flint. But over time, it'll be degraded, but if you pay this, then you can be upgraded again. Thank you so much, Sarah. It's great to talk to you.
I'm sure early stage founders are gonna hear this and start to think more clearly about choices they're making with their products. So thanks so much for all the work and your time. Oh, great. Okay. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate the conversation. Okay, Sarah. Take care. Alright. Take care. Bye. You've been listening to the NFX podcast.
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