We don't talk (about Facebook) any more
Plus how ChatGPT is setting freelancers against editors, and much more
Back in the days when advertising creatives put effort into their work year-round, not just for Christmas, the Danish beer brand Carlsberg had an advert showing a businessman walking down an office corridor when he hears a phone ringing. He looks around, goes into a dusty room, picks up the phone, answers it. It’s a wrong number. He puts the phone down, looks around at the unoccupied, unused office, shrugs, walks out—past the sign on the door saying “Carlsberg Customer Complaints Dept”. (Watch it on the Internet Archive. There are versions on YouTube, but they have annoying ads or are in the wrong aspect ratio.)
The idea of the company department that nobody from outside bothers to contact is thus used brilliantly to burnish Carlsberg’s catchline (“probably the best lager in the world”). And who wouldn’t want sometimes to have the job where nobody bothers you, the sinecure where work proceeds at your pace, rather than having to respond to external pressures all the time?
I’m not saying that working in the press office for Facebook (the social network, not Meta, the overall owner of Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp) is like sitting in that dusty office imagined in the advert. But we really don’t hear a lot about scandals involving the blue site, aka Facebook.
Now you could argue that this is due to the name change to Meta, which happened back in October 2021. That was a few weeks later in the same month that Frances Haugen revealed she was the whistleblower who had leaked tons of documents from inside Facebook, disclosing how celebrities and politicians were given far more leeway than ordinary users, was slow to act on human trafficking allegations, and knew that Instagram was “toxic for teens”.
But the Haugen revelations seem to have been the high watermark for Facebook’s problems. Since then, Google Trends data show that things have really quietened down, and that it isn’t due to the name change: “Facebook scandal” still scores higher than “Meta scandal” over the past five years, with the latter remaining far below the former, but with levels in news reporting down by at least 75%, and probably more. You can see, in the (higher) blue line below, a little peak in October 2021, which is when Haugen unmasked herself, though she had been providing documents to the Wall Street Journal for some time before. But after that, it all just peters out.
What happened? Where did Facebook go? Why doesn’t anyone do big exposés about how terrible people have been organising Bad Things on Facebook Groups, how the Oversight Board keeps being ignored, how it’s a breeding ground for election interference? Why is it that a Google News search for “Facebook” gives me such exciting fare as the Halesowen News’s “Rubbish deal agreed on Facebook lands woman in court” (a woman paid someone found via Facebook £40 to remove some rubbish bags from her home; they fly-tipped them and her details were found in the debris). What happened, Facebook?
Well, there has been some news to push Facebook up the rankings: a $725m settlement in the US of a class action where the company was accused of sharing user data or making it accessible to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica. The settlement covers any US resident who used the site between May 2007 and December 2022. (Even if you qualify, you likely won’t get much: the class who qualify for reparations is about 200 million people.)
But.. Cambridge Analytica? It feels like a million years ago, when Facebook was relevant. When it was a contender. When it could boast about affecting elections (directly, rather than helping Russians or others do so), tweaking people’s moods, when people would come together on it to plan big things such as a visit to the US Capitol and an unscheduled tour of the buildings there.
Now there’s just a feeling that Facebook is.. over. Which is strange, because its Q4 financials suggest that it’s as present as ever: static in the US and Canada and Europe, and growing ever so slightly in other parts of the world.
But the feeling, again, is that Facebook isn’t making the weather. A large part of this is because the focus on social media, but also news generally, had shifted away from it. The period from 2020-2022 includes some of the most insane cryptocurrency stories, with 2022 in particular offering a series of dominoes falling which ended up with the supernova of them all (so far) in the form of FTX’s bankruptcy in mid-November.
Furthermore, any social media oxygen was consumed first by TikTok, and its assumed threat to America, and then—exhaustingly—by Elon Musk’s will-he-won’t-he-why-is-he wildly overpriced bid for Twitter, which ran from April 2022 through to November, and has continued to distract everyone, despite the site’s dwindling impact on news sites.
Speaking of which, Facebook wants to tell the outside world—well, publications—that it totally doesn’t need them, in a study published a few weeks ago, and written up here by the UK’s Press Gazette:
A report commissioned by Meta about Facebook’s relationship with news providers argued the platform is not a “must-have” one for publishers.
The report claimed links to news stories account for less than 3% of what Facebook users around the world see in their feeds and that publishers’ content therefore “plays an economically small and diminishing role” on the platform. It later described that role as “limited and falling” and said the proportion was so low because just 7.5% of all posts seen in US Facebook feeds even contain a link.
Oh, sure, the expert report was commissioned by Meta for Facebook to look into whether Facebook ought to be paying news publishers for all those news links that appear in Facebook Newsfeeds, and shockingly enough decided that no, they don’t deserve a thing. Quelle surprise!
The report was produced by US-based economic consulting firm Nera for Meta in response to legislation being prepared in the UK, US and Canada to force the Facebook owner and Google to pay publishers for the use of their news content. Australia passed its News Media Bargaining Code in 2021.
Facebook has already begun to distance itself from news, repeatedly altering its algorithm in a way that deprioritises publisher content, revealing last year it will no longer pay publishers in the US to feature their content in its Facebook News tab, and dropping Instant Articles.
We get it, Facebook: you don’t need news. But it seems the news isn’t interested in you, either. There’s a saying that all political careers end in failure. For social media, they all end in desuetude: nobody goes there any more. Even if, in the case of Facebook, it’s more popular than ever. No, it makes no sense. And yet that’s what we see: a network that has lost its relevance, lost its impact, lost its ability to change the world. Unless you’re an unfortunate houseowner in Halesowen contemplating a £40 fine. In her case, she probably wishes Facebook had never existed.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here. Thanks to Doc Searls and John Naughton who both linked to it this week.)
• The age of giant (and giant-er) LLMs is over, says OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Yes, but what if he’s just trying to fake people? No, Altman insists: GPT-4, trained on a quintygarbillion chunks of text, only shows linear improvements over GPT-3.5, despite having exponentially more chunks of data to work with. Now it comes down to tuning.
• “Astronaut Bowman, this is Mission Control. We have some advice after running on our HAL9000 twin.” (If only Kubrick and Clarke1 could see GPT-4 now.)
• Man submits picture to photo competition, picture wins, man disclaims prize because picture was created by AI. This might sound like a story you’ve heard before, but it only resembles it very closely, and is going to happen more and more.
• “When Is a Photo Not a Photo? The Looming Specter of Artificially Generated Photographs”.
• The Washington Post analysed which sites were used to build up Google’s AI training dataset. There are a lot of them, though one-third have vanished from the net.
• ChatGPT is taking work away from freelance writers because it’s cheaper; the freelancers’ retaliation is to use ChatGPT to write work because it’s faster. Doesn’t seem like this will end well. Very much an AI tsunami overwhelming both: more content, less money.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat.
If you’d like a fun rabbithole, read the original screenplay that Kubrick and Clarke wrote for 2001: it’s quite some distance from what you see on screen, taking out much of the leaden plot signalling (Clarke’s, I suspect) and the role of narrator (often a mark of desperation, unless they’re the unreliable kind). The final screenplay, which I can’t find in a single piece, conforms much more to “show, don’t tell”, and even “don’t show, imply”—for the latter, think of what happens to Poole outside the spaceship: you don’t exactly see what happens, just its aftermath.