Mark Zuckerberg used to at least pretend to be happy. (Photo By Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
It has been ten years since Facebook’s IPO. Superficially, the experience is the same: news feed, friends network, third-party apps. Yet the feel of the site has completely changed. Whether it was the parade of casual game notifications, the injection of endless clickbait and memes, or the slow ossification of discourse into like-minded and frequently vicious agreement, Facebook doesn’t feel antisocial these days so much as alien: a parade of voices each occupying a small, hermetic sphere, mostly oblivious to each other. (Of course, the alternative of having these spheres interact, as on Twitter, is far worse.)
I have seen tenured university professors post the most simple-minded memes about everything from manspreading to microaggressions. I have seen published writers buy into conspiracy theories around Trump and Biden alike. I have seen a sheer unity of sentiment dominate on issues from Covid-19 to Ukraine, demarcating increasingly limited bounds of dissent. I have watched people go from dismissing masks to evangelising them, from criticising mass media to reposting MSNBC (or Fox), from attacking Big Pharma to worshiping at the altar of Pfizer. I have seen civil wars over pronouns, literary awards, and memes. Throughout it all there has been increasing intolerance within every micro-sect, the price of disagreement turning far more quickly into stigma than ever before.
Ten years ago it was different. A general sense of bonhomie and celebration reigned. Discussion was polite; when there was disagreement, it petered out into acceptance of differences. More than anything, there wasn’t any particular impression that Facebook was looking over our shoulders at the discussion. And there wasn’t any particular sentiment that discussion mattered. We were sitting around a water cooler, shooting the shit, talking about politics and society as we would about baseball. Today, there is the incessant sense that every discussion counts, the insecure paranoia that any deviation from the right moral path is just a step down the slippery slope toward fascism — or communism, take your pick.
Is Facebook responsible for this evolution? Yes and no. Facebook the company is only partly responsible, but Facebook the service absolutely is. The heightened tone of political discourse since Brexit and Trump’s election has put the fear of god into elites and hoi polloi alike, every side convinced they are losing ground to forces with unchecked power. The Trump years became a nonstop doomscroll of panic in every direction at once. A brief glance at the other side was no better: evil corporations and Congress were hamstringing Trump’s attempts to clean the swamp, whether it was Google, George Soros, or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
And yet it is Facebook that has done more than any person or company — except possibly Twitter — to produce this outcome. The story begins with FarmVille.
In the beginning, Facebook lacked a clear revenue model. Computers could learn what Amazon users wanted to buy and what Google search users were interested in, but it was hard for them to figure out what Facebook users wanted because most of the time they were just talking, and computers do not understand human speech well.
FarmVille (and its clones CityVille, CastleVille, etc.) changed this. Zynga’s addictive game hooked players into paying money to keep their crops from drying up and animals from dying, and rewarded them for advertising the game to their Facebook friends, further spreading the gospel of FarmVille. The model did not make users happy. It made them miserable, as they were always playing catch-up to keep their farm alive. Yet people continued playing. The game was free to play, but you had to pay to win.
Facebook made a remarkable portion of their revenue from Zynga’s offerings alone. By 2013, the FarmVille model had more or less burnt itself out, as there were too few who were willing to go along with its exploitative gameplay model past a certain point. The lesson, however, remained: The attention and engagement of Facebook users needed to be focused on more lucrative pastimes than merely commenting on each other’s status updates.
In the subsequent years, Facebook went through several more iterations of seeking the most viral content, all of which drew users away from the original, unprofitable model of engaging with friends and toward models of clicking, liking, sharing, and above all reacting. FarmVille had made people feel urgent and important, if only to an imaginary digital farm. There were other ways to provoke those emotions. The mid-2010s saw an explosion of clickbait in all its forms, with countless outlets on the Left and Right spitting out outrage article after outrage article in order to gain the most shares and clicks. Viral content took other forms: Buzzfeed‘s listicles, a silly dress that looked blue to some people and gold to others, and personality tests of every stripe. Engaging with and sharing this content replaced much of what Facebook had been, and the company benefited greatly, because it use this content to sell ads.
So when Facebook, reeling from the increased toxicity of rabidly angry content being spread across its platform, started de-ranking news articles and links in general starting in 2017 and 2018, it wasn’t clear what was going to fill the gap. The supposed goal was to restore civility and interpersonal connections, like what Facebook used to be. The problem was, what Facebook used to be still didn’t pay. So Facebook entered an era of genuine uncertainty, first claiming that they were going to emphasise encrypted, private communications, toying with a cryptocurrency that never took off, and finally settling on a nebulous metaverse strategy that Mark Zuckerberg is currently betting the company on.
But where did that leave Facebook users? The past did not simply disappear. Years of clicking, clickbait, and anger have quite visibly melted the minds of many people whom I knew to have been brilliant independent thinkers, but who now hop on the agreed-upon issue or outrage of the day and pontificate using received ideas that would put Bouvard and Pecuchet to shame. I was hardly immune to this tendency, prone to mindlessly Liking or forwarding something that happened to prick my dopamine receptors.
The 2010s sorted us all into our like-minded bubbles, and if everyone agrees on something within a bubble, then those people must be experts to have such uniformity of agreement. “I believe in science!” “MAGA!” “Masks4All!” Even in the absence of clickbait, hashtags and slogans now take their place, serving the same viral purpose that outrage bait and hate-clicks once did.
This is where Facebook is today. Their pursuit of engagement and attention spun far beyond what they had even intended, until they were left with an audience that had gone beyond being dumbed down into dumbing itself down. Controversy has forced Facebook into the reluctant role of ad hoc and inadequate censor, banning people for innocuous (if rude) comments while letting malignant conspiracy theories run unchecked. And everywhere, everyone is convinced that their little discussion group has the power to change the world if only it could be sufficiently policed and weaponised.
The opposite is true, of course. Having fired our dopamine receptors with the increasing sense that what we do on Facebook is consequential, our only way back to sanity is to realise that our opinions on Elon Musk buying Twitter or even Russia invading the Ukraine mean very little to most of our friends, and practically nothing to the world at large. But then there would be less reason to go on Facebook, save for its original purpose of just shooting the breeze. Facebook prefers that its users feel important, needed, and urged to participate. With the metaverse beckoning, expect more of the same.
David Auerbach is an American author and former Microsoft and Google software engineer.
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SubscribeGrowing up I used to collect hockey cards a common activity for the time and age group. I stopped doing it because I realize I got nothing out of it in the end. Since then anything that comes close to these kinds of activities make me skeptical that I’m being used. Social media has done the same thing to a new generation, tricking them into thinking there is some kind of value in using these platforms when all they are is ways to rob people of their time and money. The toxicity of all these platforms is by far a whole lot worse than collecting and trading cards. People aren’t paying for these services, but they are paying the price of investing their time, a whole lot of their time. I could even imagine that some might need to detox themselves because they’re so addicted. That social media has become toxic shouldn’t surprise, it’s free, but at a price, the price of click addiction and likes, so many like, so many virtual likes.
You mention that people don’t pay for Facebook services but pay in terms of time and money, but it’s probably worse than that, didn’t someone once say something like: If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product?
I am sure there are many statements like the one you mentioned here. There is no free ride, never has been and anyone who thinks they are getting a free ride is naive.
When Facebook was founded, it was funded for a very long time without generating any real revenue. That should make everyone sceptical because at some point investors want a return on their investment. That sounds logical, but most people never thought about it, they just used the service because it was free. If Facebook had charged a monthly annual fee for its service, even if it had been a very small price, no one would have paid for it. That should be a good indication of what the true value of this company is. Its only value is that it can profit from the mass of users by running sponsored ads to pay for the service. This automatically means that advertisers also want to have a say in what is published on the platforms. The same goes for all other social media services. It is so obvious and yet no one wants to admit it.
Advertisers are very nervous about bad publicity and sh*tstorms that could damage their reputations and products. It should surprise no one that there has to be some kind of gatekeeping and censorship.
The days of the Wild West are coming to an end.
Meh–I ditched Facebook and Twitter two years ago, and my life has changed quite noticably for the better. Nobody NEEDS social media in their lives, and I dare say that most would be much happier without it.
Never had either of them, but signed up recently to Facebook, with no content at all, just so I could use the Oculus Quest 2, which has been fun.
People using Facebook need to be mindful of the manipulation and use it for what it is good at… connecting and sharing with friends and following uplifting and informative sites. I have also met some firm, lifelong friends on FB. Many beautiful and instructive sites exist that aren’t divisive and toxic.
Of course a bit of Depp vs Heard is fascinating, but it is short lived. And I do like throwing a comment into places like The Guardian commentary from time to time, but the trick is to throw the grenade and then withdraw completely. I know it is wicked.
So bottom line is that you can control your FB experience, by curating what you read, post and respond to and by ignoring what the weirdo Zucks tries to throw at you.
One of my favourite activities is reading the desperately frustrated comments, lacking any self awareness, of Guardian and Washington Post readers – especially when they start flaming each other for tiny issues of offence in their language.
“our only way back to sanity is to realise that our opinions on Elon Musk buying Twitter or even Russia invading the Ukraine mean very little to most of our friends, and practically nothing to the world at large.”
On that note I will decline to proffer an opinion to this article.
Do you mean my comments on Unherd have no impact? At all?
I’m off down the pub.
A simple truth in that article. Happy I have read it.
I beg to differ. The groups I follow are instructive and interesting and people share their knowledge in the comments. Any unkindness is soon shut down, so it teaches people manners as well. I found Facebook helped with the isolation lockdown imposed. I love jokey memes and anything other than that that looks like clickbait, I merely ignore. Sure, lots of advertising comes up, but if the algorithms have worked, it is stuff I like and may not have found otherwise. I don’t think Facebook is responsible for the changing societal tone, I think that is down to what is happening out there. Just as in the outside world, you can always choose what company to keep.
For an article that criticizes clickbait, I find it interesting that the author chose a headline and sub-headline that suggest he’ll discuss the FUTURE of Facebook but the article itself only delves on the PAST.
Why exactly is Facebook’s strategy not working? How is it sliding into dystopia? By whose standards?
Also, I have noticed that former Microsoft and Google people tend to have a strong bias against social media companies (e.g. Eric Schmidt comes to mind).
I’m certainly not a fan of FB (to put it mildly), but I do expect more from UnHerd’s contributors and editors.
So write one
Great piece again from one of my favourite Unherd writers