INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed cheerful and even jokey when he took the stage today in front of journalists and media
executives (at one point, he described the event as &by far the best thing& he&d done this week), he acknowledged that there are reasons for
the news industry to be skeptical.
Facebook, after all, has been one of the main forces creating a difficult economic reality for the
industry over the past decade
And there are plenty of people (including our own Josh Constine) who think it would be foolish for publishers to trust the company
again.
For one thing, there the question of how Facebook algorithm prioritizes different types of content, and how changes to the algorithm
can be enormously damaging to publishers.
&We can do a better job of working with partners to have more transparency and also lead time
about what we see in the pipeline,& Zuckerberg said, adding, &I think stability is a big theme.& So Facebook might be trying something out
as an &experiment,& but &if it kind of just causes a spike, it can be hard for your business to plan for that.&
At the same time, Zuckerberg
argued that Facebook algorithms are &one of the least understood things about what we do.& Specifically, he noted that many people accuse
the company of simply optimizing the feed to keep users on the service for as long as possible.
&That actually not true,& he said
&For many years now, I&ve prohibited any of our feed teams … from optimizing the systems to encourage the maximum amount of time to be
We actually optimize the system for facilitating as many meaningful interactions as possible.&
Facebook starts testing News, its new
section for journalism
For example, he said that when Facebook changed the algorithm to prioritize friends and family content over other
types of content (like news), it effectively eliminated 50 million hours of viral video viewing each day
After the company reported its subsequent earnings, Facebook hadthe biggest drop in market capitalization in U.S
history.
Zuckerberg was onstage in New York with News Corp CEO Robert Thomson to discuss the launch of Facebook News, a new tab within the
larger Facebook product that focused entirely on news
Thomson began the conversation with a simple question: &What took you so long?&
The Facebook CEO took this in stride, responding that the
question was &one of the nicest things he could have said — that actually means he thinks we did something good.&
Zuckerberg went on to
suggest that the company has had a long interest in supporting journalism (&I just think that every internet platform has a responsibility
to try to fund and form partnerships to help news&), but that its efforts were initially focused on the News Feed, where the &fundamental
architecture& made it hard to find much room for news stories — particularly when most users are more interested in that content from
friends and family.
So Facebook News could serve as a more natural home for this news (to be clear, the company says news content will
continue to appear in the main feed as well)
Zuckerberg also said that since past experiments have created such &thrash in the ecosystem,& Facebook wanted to make sure it got this right
before launching it.
Why the Facebook News tab shouldn&t be trusted
In particular, he said the company needed to show that tabs within
Facebook, like Facebook Marketplace and Facebook Watch, could attract a meaningful audience
Zuckerberg acknowledged that the majority of Facebook users aren&t interested in these other tabs, but when you&ve got such an enormous user
base, even a small percentage can be meaningful.
&I think we can probably get to maybe 20 or 30 million people [visiting Facebook News] over
&That by itself would be very meaningful.&
Facebook is also paying some of the publishers who are participating in Facebook News
Zuckerberg described this as &the first time we&re forming long-term, stable relationships and partnerships with a lot of
publishers.&
Several journalists asked for more details about how Facebook decided which publishers to pay, and how much to pay them
Zuckerberg said it based on a number of factors, like ensuring a wide range of content in Facebook News, including from publishers who
hadn&t been publishing much on the site previously
The company also had to compensate publishers who are taking some of their content out from behind their paywalls.
&This is not an exact
formula — maybe we&ll get to that over time — but it all within a band,& he said.
Lowlights from Zuckerberg Libra testimony in
Congress
Zuckerberg was also asked about how Facebook will deal with accuracy and quality, particularly given the recent controversy over
its unwillingness to fact check political ads.
He sidestepped the political ads question, arguing that it unrelated to the day topics, then
said, &This is a different kind of thing.& In other words, he argued that the company has much more leeway here to determine what is and
isn&t included — both by requiring any participating publishers to abide by Facebook publisher guidelines, and by hiring a team of
journalists to curate the headlines that show up in the Top Stories section.
&People have a different expectation in a space dedicated to
high-quality news than they do in a space where the goal is to make sure everyone can have a voice and can share their opinion,& he said.
As
for whether Facebook News will include negative stories about Facebook, Zuckerberg seemed delighted to learn that Bloomberg (mostly) doesn&t
cover Bloomberg.
&I didn&t know that was a thing a person could do,& he joked
More seriously, he said, &For better or worse, we&re a prominent part of a lot of the news cycles
I don&t think it would be reasonable to try to have a news tab that didn&t cover the stuff that Facebook is doing
In order to make this a trusted source over time, they have to be covered objectively.&
