Facebook

Facebook recently introduced a friends tab to try to recreate the feeling of scrolling your News Feed circa 2006. Alison says they think “there are some features from the very early days of Facebook and social networking that could become more interesting again” as apps including Facebook move toward public, algorithmically-recommended content. He describes it as an “experiment or a bet that we’re making to almost bring a little bit of nostalgia to Facebook as the core experience goes away from friends.”

In an interview published in October 2022, Alison told Wired’s Steven Levy that “Facebook is still at its core about friends and family.” But Alison testifies that if he were to redo the interview today, “I would acknowledge that there are a large number of people who are not using Facebook to connect with friends and family.” He adds that the world has changed so much that “we are seeing that not to be as true today as it felt two and half years ago when this interview took place.”

This was true even as the app built out its discovery engine, which powers algorithmic recommendations of content from users who are connected with one another, Alison testifies. The FTC is using Alison’s testimony to establish that in the past few years and through today, a sizable number of users still come to Facebook to connect with their friends, and the company recognizes this even as it expands into other use cases. Still, Alison says, Facebook now thinks about facilitating connections as inclusive of people users don’t know in real life, including content creators.

Not everyone who joins Facebook these days does so to find their friends on the service, Alison says. He testifies there’s a “growing” number of people who join the app with no friends, and don’t see any friend content on the app. Meta has argued that connecting with friends is an increasingly smaller portion of what users come to its apps for. The FTC says that as an absolute number, there’s still a sizable number of users who do want to connect with friends, and Facebook and Instagram are virtually the only games in town.

Alison downplays how much users care about connecting with their Facebook friends versus other potential connections, like content creators. “I have friends I haven’t seen in 30 years or I met once at a party that I don’t care about,” he says.

It’s not enough to look at what users say they want from Facebook, Alison says, you also have to look at what their actions tell you about what they want. Just because users say in surveys they want to see more friend content, doesn’t mean that’s how it plays out. “When people actually got more friend content on Facebook they visited Facebook less,” he testifies.

Alison is expected to be one of the FTC’s last major witnesses in its case-in-chief. The FTC’s lead attorney Dan Matheson is driving home the point that Meta knows that people want to see posts from their friends when they come to Facebook, by looking at a 2021 internal presentation where it found in a survey that “3 of the 4 top user pain points were related to friend content.”

Meta, which purports to be a leader in AI, has been unable to stop the proliferation of deepfake advertisements impersonating Financial Times writer Martin Wolf on Facebook and Instagram. “Is it really that hard or are they not trying, as Sarah Wynn-Williams suggests in her excellent book Careless People?” Wolf asks. There’s also a fairly incredible graph showing the number of deepfakes skyrocketing after the FT told Meta about the scam. This article isn’t behind FT’s paywall— and it’s definitely worth your time.

For those of you who don’t know Latin: Zuck’s tee is “aut Zuck aut nihil,” a play on “aut Caesar aut nihil,” which means “Zuck or nothing.” Graber’s tee is “mundus sine caesaribus,” or “a world without Caesars.” We love a woman who can shitpost IRL.

Contrary to what Facebook ad scams are promoting via deepfake videos of Fox News personalities, Musk hasn’t discovered “one simple trick” to reverse the blood sugar condition. Most of these ads, which Engadget started noticing in early February, are linking viewers to unproven supplements that “big pharma” doesn’t want you to see.

Users on a Facebook group for Cybertruck owners are posting about public backlash being directed towards their vehicles, showing people flicking them off and lewd or abusive messages they’ve received.

Meta has ditched the pink/purple hued design it introduced in 2020 and replaced it with a more boring version.

During Meta’s fourth-quarter earnings call today, Mark Zuckerberg kept dropping hints about big plans for Facebook. He’s focused on making it more “culturally influential.” He even suggested that some changes could hurt the business in the short term. The goal is to “get back to how Facebook was used back in the day.” So, more of stalking your classmates and less AI Shrimp Jesus?

Mark Zuckerberg “blamed his former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, for an inclusivity initiative at Facebook” when pledging support to Trump advisors late last year, according to the New York Times.

404 Media reports that trans and non-binary pride chat themes were “retired” this week and announcements scrubbed from the web — just as Meta is allowing more hate speech.

Leaked training documents obtained by The Intercept offer more details about Meta’s updated Hateful Conduct rules. Specific examples of speech Meta allows include “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit,” “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians,” and “Trans people are immoral.”

404 Media has updates from unnamed employees on how the moderation changes have been received: