This is third (and final) in the series of posts thinking aloud about the Facebook Kerfuffle. See the first post on the nature of Information Leakage, and the second post on FOMO and how networks fall.
In this post, I spend some time mulling about societal, not social, aspects of the network, the compliance, and the complicity of everyone including researchers. I suggest some operational changes that could be helpful. This is a complicated platform problem; There is no magic bullet, but a hodgepodge of contextual solutions, but I try to frame them in an over-arching narrative.
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Thinking about Facebook, I recollect a conversation that I had with a researcher on networks, and a good friend (in real life), and one who also happens to be fairly active on Facebook. He mentioned something about Facebook friends’ network that had always stuck with me.
“Facebook makes distant friends closer and moves close friends further”
Many socially adept users so inclined to be “public persons” are able to build on the open network platform to increase their friends’ circle, and in general, amass social capital.
It is hard to generalize without offline and online network data, but I suppose that for many users, acquiring such additional capital must come at the expense of closer friendships and tighter bonds. Sure, Facebook flattens the world, but it also flattens some friendships. This notion is not surprising especially if you have observed distinct differences between online and real-life versions of others (and yourself).
Natural Limits to Friendship.
In fact, anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, Robin Dunbar, has famously formulated Dunbar’s Number, as the “cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships”. It is often quoted as being 150 but varies widely from 100 to 300 depending on the context, idiosyncratic differences, and heterogeneity in persons. We don’t know what that precise number is, but there is a widespread acceptance that there is a cognitive constraint in our heads. (Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens also alludes to this number when discussing the formation and stability of rumors and information in tribes).
Two questions are consequential to Facebook and society: Do such limits also apply in online social network contexts? Do we need to think of relationships on online social networks differently?
Dunbar’s 2016 paper “Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks?” indeed gets into this question, supporting the thesis indeed there is a constraint even for online relationships.
It is reflected in the fact that younger teenagers have been finding Facebook not so cool. (In a humorous vein, there are several memes about Moms getting on Facebook). Anyway, here is Dunbar in the paper —
It is perhaps worth noting that there has been a notable tendency for teenagers to move away from using Facebook as a social environment and to make use of media like Snapchat,WeChat, Vine, Flickr and Instagram instead [73], with Facebook being reserved mainly for managing social arrangements. It is not yet entirely clear what has driven this, but the fact that Facebook is too open to view by others seems to have been especially important [74,75]. Teenagers have much smaller offline social networks than adults [24,76], and forcing them to enlarge their network with large numbers of anonymous ‘friends-of-friends’ may place significant strain on their ability to manage their networks.
The Openness of Connections.
Facebook has always been about connecting more people. This is why Facebook’s then ads-VP, Andrew “Boz” Bosworth’s 2016 memo is both revelatory and controversial. Here’s a key quote:
[A brief aside: Bosworth has consequently semi-disavowed, but did not retract, on twitter,The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned…
“It was intended to be provocative. This was one of the most unpopular things I’ve ever written internally and the ensuing debate helped shape our tools for the better.”
I hope that this post is part of the debate in true spirit].
So, Facebook has always been about connecting more and more people. So “friends-of-friends” and such network leaks are a natural component of this grand objective. There is indeed a controlled limit on the number of direct friends you can acquire on Facebook. The limit is 5000, which is far north of Dunbar’s number. In fact, the average number of friends that people have is on Facebook is also significantly lower, at 338, according to somewhat dated 2014 data from Pew Research). A more recent 2016 Statista data show indeed 41% of the users have fewer than 200 friends.
As a thought experiment, write down all the first names of all the people you knew in life, whose faces you remember and can recognize when you see them on the street!
Openness and Privacy are (of course) often misaligned.
The size of tribes under Dunbar’s number is far smaller than the “communities” that Facebook envisions — the ones that Mark Zuckerberg often alludes to in the interviews. Fundamentally, (most) users want to restrict how they share information and what information they share with whom, and this interest is misaligned with “friends of friends”-type openness that Facebook permeates.
In his recent open interview to media publications, Mark Zuckerberg handled some hard questions. When Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic asked about balancing the wishes of the community that are against business needs, Zuckerberg mentioned those trade-offs are “quite easy”. Zuckerberg is talking about two different things – on one issue he is right on, and on the other not so much. So, to be fair, and to place the answer in the right context, I want to put the entire answer from Facebook transcripts of the interview.
Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic: Every company, big and small, balances the service they provide with the needs of the business. In light of [Andrew Bosworth] Boz’s post and your rethinking of Facebook’s responsibility, have you ever made a decision that benefited Facebook’s business but hurt the community?
Mark: I’ll answer your question, but first because you brought up Boz’s post. Let me take a moment to make sure that everyone understands that I disagreed with that at the time and I disagree with that now. I don’t think that it stands for what most people inside the company believe. If you looked at the comments on that thread, when he initially wrote it, it was massively negative. So, I feel like that’s an important point to set aside.
In terms of the questions you asked, balancing stakeholders, the thing that I think makes our product challenging to manage and operate are not the trade-offs between the people and the business — I actually think that those are quite easy because over the long term the business will be better if you serve people. I just think that it would be near-sighted to focus on short-term revenue over what value to people is, and I don’t think we are that short-sighted. All of the hard decisions that we have to make are actually trade-offs between people. One of the big differences between the type of product that we are building is — which is why I refer to it as a community and what I think some of the specific governance challenges we have are — the different people that use Facebook have different interests. Some people want to share political speech that they think is valid, and other people feel like it’s hate speech. And then, people ask us, “Are you just leaving that up because you want people to be able to share more?” These are real values and questions and trade-offs. Free expression on the one hand, making sure it’s a safe community on the other hand. We have to make sure we get to the right place, and we’re doing that in an environment that’s not static. The social norms are changing continually, and they’re different in every country around the world. Getting those trade-offs right is hard, and we certainly don’t always get them right. To me, that’s the hard part about running the company—not the trade-off between the people and the business.
I suppose that Zuckerberg is saying that putting community ahead is clearly better in the long-term and that it’s easy. No! First, balancing short-term interests vs. long-term interests is not easy. (Otherwise, every retailer could have replicated to some extent the relentless long-termism of Amazon). Second, even if it were obvious how to do that, the mechanics of balancing tradeoffs on a large-scale platform for long-term interests are non-trivial. Mark Zuckerberg acknowledges the second part is hard (in his allusion to norms being different over time and across geographies, etc) and they “don’t always get them right”.
As a point of illustration, let me bring up “external adjudicators” or gate-keepers of information, which Zuckerberg mentions in his interviews. In principle, it is a reasonable idea, but I cannot see how it could be easy to execute. As a first step, since the platform has already connected billions of users, many reputed adjudicators are already part of the platform. But let’s soldier on…
The Futility of “Independent” Experts.
Here’s Mark Zuckerberg in his Vox interview with Ezra Klein:
[…] some sort of independent appeal process. Right now, if you post something on Facebook and someone reports it and our community operations and review team looks at it and decides that it needs to get taken down, there’s not really a way to appeal that. I think in any kind of good-functioning democratic system, there needs to be a way to appeal. And I think we can build that internally as a first step.But over the long term, what I’d really like to get to is an independent appeal. So maybe folks at Facebook make the first decision based on the community standards that are outlined, and then people can get a second opinion. You can imagine some sort of structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world.
There are a lot of experts who don’t work for Facebook, but the problem is that well-known experts are likely to be popular on Facebook (or some other platform). Media-liked “thought leaders” benefit significantly from Facebook, and are also well-informed about using Facebook, unlike most of the two billion odd users on Facebook. In fact, the experts have the same incentive misalignment problem that Facebook has.
Just as Money is key to Access in political influence, (Data and people) Access is key to Impact in academic circles in related areas of research.
If anything, the Cambridge Analytica kerfuffle demonstrates patently demonstrates this issue. It was a research problem!
It is not clear how this panel of disinterested experts could be formed across the nations. Perhaps, such things are possible, who knows? However, I will focus on some short-term things Facebook can do to improve the platform for users (not just those extremely active ones) in a meaningful way.
I am not going to suggest that Facebook charge users – theoretically it is not a bad idea. But, I have not thought about it as much, and it anyway seems that the idea is a non-starter in the interviews. This is because pricing is a discontinuous shift in the preferred continuity of moderate changes.
What can Facebook do? The future is Small (and slow).
In the spirit of being useful, I would think of three ideas (with associated minor operational controls). Instead of presenting technical details, I write about them at a conceptual level. In all cases, the future is in small networks. The idea is to reduce the network based on cognitive constraints.
1. Think of Time. Essentially Facebook transacts on time. In fact, Facebook has moved towards “time well spent” (See efforts by Tristan Harris in this space). One way to explore how to budget time is to think of how we read books, but essentially the shrink the problem into a time-scale. “What to read for next week?” gets scaled to you might like this set of articles for the next half hour. Some explorations such as limiting liking an article within one minute, opening the “share” button only after the “pause” period based on scroll data, etc. Essentially, Facebook should simple operational controls to slow-down the process flow of information. (At the always educational Stratechery, Ben Thompson has astutely noted that similar efforts on the supply side, such as shutting down APIs for firms, already align well with Facebook’s objectives now).
2. The Whatsapp Way — Closed Groups. From November 2017, Facebook has been trying to present more content from postings of family and friends, than newsfeeds and such things. This is because as Zuckerberg says, “Facebook is about bringing people closer together and enabling meaningful social interactions.” While this direction of action does cut the over-misaligned revenue incentives from ad-space, it may not be compliant with what users may seek.
Not everyone who is on Facebook is “social”: It is fairly obvious without even looking at internal data, just based on the public data on a large percentage of “no-Likers”, and a large percentage of users with “small networks”. As I argued in my second post in this series, Facebook also needs these users to continue using the site without pestering them with messages. Reducing the “friend of friend” networks, open cross-tagging, and spread of memes are steps that would help these users to stick on the platforms. One strategy is to direct such users to interest “groups” they are most interested in.
One way to rethink this Facebook is to leverage Family groups, school groups, research groups, as a part of Facebook Groups. (An old reminder of yahoo groups, closed bulletin boards and Whatsapp, which is owned by Facebook). Facebook could emphasize the “entryway” on the landing, and ask in a spirit similar to SouthWest, “Where do you want to go today?”
Now close groups generate friction in sharing across groups — but this is precisely the whole point.
3. Limit Friends. Facebook should examine introducing limits to closer to Dunbar’s Number for reciprocal relationships. Such an action would require significantly reducing the constraint which is barely met for most people, according to the data. (This constraint does not apply for ad promotions and one-way connections, i.e., no of people who like a movie, etc).
Soft Ceilings (or Treat connections like real-life networks). One user option is to stratify friends according to time spent interacting (this could be made a choice) which (a) gives more control, and (b) naturalizes it for users who want to enjoy an organic experience. Otherwise, it would help users to set privately, their frequency of interaction. These are friends I would like to update daily or learn about daily. Then a set of friends to connect once or twice every week, a few times a month, a few times a year (birthdays!), and so on.
So the three principles – Budgeting Time, Grouping, and Limiting – would be a nice start!
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References:
Do online social media cut through the constraints that limit the size of offline social networks? . Royal Society Open Journal.