2018 change saw Facebook rewarding outrage; Zuckerberg resisted fixes – With insights from The Wall Street Journal

‘The right thing’

In January 2018, Facebook was coming off a trying year. It was on the defensive in Washington about what U.S. intelligence officials said was Russia’s use of the platform to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Mr. Zuckerberg announced he was changing Facebook product managers’ goal from helping people find relevant content to helping them interact more with friends and family.

He said the shift was driven by research showing that passive media consumption on Facebook—notably video, which had been exploding on the platform—wasn’t as good for well-being as interacting with other people.

He framed the change as a sacrifice. “Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” he wrote on Facebook. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”

Facebook training videos and internal memos show another reason for the change—the company’s growing concern about a decline in user engagement, which typically refers to actions like commenting on or sharing posts. Engagement is viewed inside the company as an important sign for the health of the business.

Comments, likes and reshares declined through 2017, while “original broadcast” posts—the paragraph and photo a person might post when a dog dies—continued a yearslong decline that no intervention seemed able to stop, according to the internal memos. The fear was that eventually users might stop using Facebook altogether.

One data scientist said in a 2020 memo that Facebook teams studied the issue and “never really figured out why metrics declined.” The team members ultimately concluded that the prevalence of video and other professionally produced content, rather than organic posts from individuals, was likely part of the problem.

The goal of the algorithm change was to reverse the decline in comments, and other forms of engagement, and to encourage more original posting. It would reward posts that garnered more comments and emotion emojis, which were viewed as more meaningful than likes, the documents show.

In an internal training video, one Facebook employee said that in addition to the company’s “ethical duty” not to turn users into zombies with too much video, it had business reasons for intervening.

“People will probably leave the app if it’s bad for them,” the employee said.

Ranking reshares

Facebook’s solution was to create a formula that measured how much “meaningful” interaction a post sparked, then organize the News Feed to encourage as much of that as possible. Under an internal point system used to measure its success, a “like” was worth one point; a reaction, reshare without text or reply to an invite was worth five points; and a significant comment, message, reshare or RSVP, 30 points. Additional multipliers were added depending on whether the interaction was between members of a group, friends or strangers.

From a business perspective, it worked. As Facebook predicted, time spent on the platform declined, but the effort to maximize interactions between users slowed the free fall in comments, and mostly improved the all-important metric of “daily active people” using Facebook, according to tests run in August 2018, internal memos show.

The change had some positive effects. Content shared by close connections was more trustworthy, and users found it more meaningful than material from more distant acquaintances, according to one memo. But those benefits were outweighed by the aspect of the algorithm change that favored user actions like reshares and comments.

In an early sign of trouble, during the summer of 2018, Facebook data scientists repeatedly surveyed users and found that many felt the quality of their feeds had decreased, the documents show.

As Facebook had warned was likely, the change hurt many online publishers. In the first half of 2018, BuzzFeed suffered a 13% decline in traffic compared with the prior six months, Breitbart lost 46% and ABC News lost 12%, according to online data firm Comscore.

Topix, a news site known for local community forums, lost 53% of its traffic over that period. “Facebook was our major traffic driver at this time,” said Chris Tolles, Topix’s former CEO. “That was certainly a problem for us.” Topix was purchased by Publishers Clearing House in 2019.

In interviews, more than a dozen publishing executives described Facebook’s shift as the final straw after several years of constantly changing policies that convinced them they couldn’t rely on Facebook for traffic.

BuzzFeed rose to prominence on internet confections like lists and quizzes, but over the years built a robust news operation and expanded aggressively into video. Facebook has historically been a major source of traffic for BuzzFeed, though the publisher has diversified its distribution in recent years.

Buzzfeed’s Mr. Peretti, in his email, wrote that the new algorithm seemed to be disproportionately rewarding divisiveness, based on what the publisher saw in its own numbers and his observations about how other publishers’ posts performed.

“MSI ranking isn’t actually rewarding content that drives meaningful social interactions,” Mr. Peretti wrote in his email to the Facebook official, adding that his staff felt “pressure to make bad content or underperform.”

It wasn’t just material that exploited racial divisions, he wrote, but also “fad/junky science,” “extremely disturbing news” and gross images.

Political effect

In Poland, the changes made political debate on the platform nastier, Polish political parties told the company, according to the documents. The documents don’t specify which parties.

“One party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm,” wrote two Facebook researchers in an April 2019 internal report.

Nina Jankowicz, who studies social media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said she has heard complaints from many political parties in that region that the algorithm change made direct communication with their supporters through Facebook pages more difficult. They now have an incentive, she said, to create posts that rack up comments and shares—often by tapping into anger—to get exposure in users’ feeds.

The Facebook researchers, wrote in their report that in Spain, political parties run sophisticated operations to make Facebook posts travel as far and fast as possible.

“They have learnt that harsh attacks on their opponents net the highest engagement,” they wrote. “They claim that they ‘try not to,’ but ultimately ‘you use what works.’ ”

In the 15 months following fall 2017 clashes in Spain over Catalan separatism, the percentage of insults and threats on public Facebook pages related to social and political debate in Spain increased by 43%, according to research conducted by Constella Intelligence, a Spanish digital risk protection firm.

Facebook researchers wrote in their internal report that they heard similar complaints from parties in Taiwan and India.

Brad Parscale, who was the digital strategy leader for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and boasted that Facebook is where Mr. Trump won the election, said he began to notice changes to the algorithm as early as mid-2017, when the performance of political videos began to decline.

“ ‘Healthy’ is a cover word for ‘We need to reduce conservative and Trump video spread,’ ” he said in an interview for this article.

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel, then-House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) and Mr. Parscale met with Facebook executives in June 2018 to register their complaints. At that meeting, which included Facebook global public-policy chief Joel Kaplan, the Republicans were told the algorithm changes were meant to counter the spread of what the company considered misinformation, according to Mr. Parscale.

Proposed fixes

In April 2019, one Facebook data scientist proposed reducing the spread of “deep reshares,” which means the viewer is not a friend or follower of the original poster, according to an internal memo.

“While the FB platform offers people the opportunity to connect, share and engage, an unfortunate side effect is that harmful and misinformative content can go viral, often before we can catch it and mitigate its effects,” he wrote. “Political operatives and publishers tell us that they rely more on negativity and sensationalism for distribution due to recent algorithmic changes that favor reshares.”

Later, Facebook data scientists zeroed in on an aspect of the revamped algorithm called “downstream MSI,” which made a post more likely to appear in a user’s News Feed if the algorithm calculated people were likely to share or comment on it as it passed down the chain of reshares.

Early tests showed how reducing that aspect of the algorithm for civic and health information helped reduce the proliferation of false content. Facebook made the change for those categories in the spring of 2020.

When Ms. Stepanov presented Mr. Zuckerberg with the integrity team’s proposal to expand that change beyond civic and health content—and a few countries such as Ethiopia and Myanmar where changes were already being made—Mr. Zuckerberg said he didn’t want to pursue it if it reduced user engagement, according to the documents.

James Barnes, a former Facebook employee who left in 2019, said Facebook had hoped that giving priority to user engagement in the News Feed would bring people closer together. But the platform had grown so complex the company didn’t understand how the change might backfire.

“There are no easy silver bullets,” he said.

—Natalia Ojewska contributed to this article.

—Design by Andrew Levinson.

Appeared in the September 16, 2021, print edition as ‘Facebook Tried to Make Platform Healthier. It Got Angrier Instead..’