Gizmodo reports:

Several key [internal] documents [published by Gizmodo today] concern what Facebook calls “meaningful social interactions,” a term introduced by the company in Jan. 2018. This metric, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained at the time, was meant to help prioritize “personal connections’’ over an endless online dribble of viral news and videos. This “major change,” as he put it, was framed as an effort to put first the “happiness and health” of the user—Facebook’s way of encouraging users to check Facebook more often by dialing up the feeling of personal connection to their Feeds.

What constitutes a meaningful social interaction? Meta’s phrasing seems intentionally opaque: It could be sharing a cold beer with an old friend or maybe a meal with the whole family under the same roof. To Facebook, it’s a math problem; a way of training an computer to assign some degree of worth to the most benign online behaviors—putting a sticker, for instance, on a random weirdo’s post.

Zuckerberg has denied before Congress that “increasing the amount of time people spend” staring at their feeds has ever been Facebook’s goal. It’s a claim that flies in the face of everything we know about his business and his own top deputy’s words. In fact, Meta’s financial disclosures have for years warned investors of the following: “If we fail to retain existing users or add new users, or if our users decrease their level of engagement with our products, our revenue, financial results, and business may be significantly harmed.” (Emphasis ours.) In February, Facebook lost hundreds of billions in stock market value on reports that its active user count dropped for the first time ever. The company has every motivation to acquire new users and increase the time existing users spend on the social network.

On the subject of ranking, the documents below contain an admission from one employee that is indicative of Facebook’s quandary of growth vs. user health. The employee wrote that the evidence favoring ranking is “extensive, and nearly universal.” People like ranked feeds more than chronological ones. According to the employee, “usage and engagement immediately drops” wherever the Feed’s ranking is disabled. The increased usage comes at a price, though. The quality of the user’s overall experience declines. [Continue reading…]