I’m writing this in multiple places. It started on my phone between acts from a lawn chair at the Palomino Stage at Stagecoach. It then moved to the Palm Springs airport, and now it’s on my flight from Minneapolis to DC. It was a wild weekend. From the epic Eric Church performance on Friday to all the guest stars like Brad Paisley and Reba on Saturday night. I’m also officially a Post Malone fan - his set was fantastic. The last day has oldies like Pam Tillis, Clint Black, and The Beach Boys. John Stamos - aka Uncle Jesse from Full House - was with the Beach Boys, and I was psyched to get to see them sing Forever live. My readers from the 90s will know what I’m talking about.
By the way, I also tried out the Meta Ray-Ban glasses. These glasses let you take pictures and videos, among other things. They are great for concerts, as I could enjoy the show and take pictures without having to view it all through a phone. My only complaint was that my video would only record for a minute or two before shutting off, so it was hard to get a full song. And my ball cap got in the shot if I was wearing it while recording.
I’ve been struggling with what to write about this week. I have many ideas from this recent trip to California, but they need to marinate more before I write about them. I’ve also felt disconnected from the elections-related work as I’m no longer warning people multiple times about all the elections happening this year. People know, and everyone is moving into execution mode. It’s also a somewhat slow time since the U.S. primaries wrapped up so quickly, and the Indian elections are just starting. (There are some things happening, but I’m not alone in thinking they are eerily quiet.)
Originally, I was going to do something from the archives. In fact, I annotated two from 2022 to send - but none sat well with me. Felt like I was calling it in. Making obvious observations. You deserve better for your time.
So, while I get my shit together, I thought that I would go back to the archives. As I read through some of my early posts, this one from February 2022 stood out. It was about how the winds of change seemed to be upon us - and how little I knew as this was 10 months before Open AI would release a new version of ChatGPT that was a gust of epic change proportions.
Here’s Changing Winds from February 4, 2022, with some commentary from me throughout in italics.
Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.
Changing Winds
I keep finding myself thinking about this verse from Bert at the beginning of Mary Poppins:
Winds in the east, mist coming in, / Like somethin' is brewin' and bout to begin. / Can't put me finger on what lies in store, / But I fear what's to happen all happened before.
Ever since Mark decided to change the name of Facebook to Meta and shift the company’s priorities, I’ve been wondering if perhaps Mark was coming to peace with the fact that the blue app was starting to stagnate and was trying to get ahead of the fact that more and more people would likely stop using it.
The earnings call on Wednesday certainly seemed to make a case for that, and the subsequent stock drop has me feeling that we’ll look back on this week as the moment when this massive battleship as we knew it finally stopped moving in the direction it was going in and truly started to pivot.
The company sure has pivoted since this time. The battleship is still turning, but the stock is generally moving back up. Their AI bets and investment into Instagram - especially Reels - are a continuous effort to diversify from the blue app. I want to point out what Mark said about AI at the time. It wasn’t a story then, but it shows how the company was thinking about AI before it exploded on the scene:
”Now onto AI, this is one of the areas where we’ve routinely seen stronger returns on our investments over time than we’ve expected. Advances in AI enable a lot of the experiences that I’ve talked about so far – it enables us to deliver better ads to people while using less data; it’s core to our safety and security work; it’s meaningfully improved the relevance of Reels and overall content ranking in general; and it plays a big role in our commerce efforts. Artificial intelligence is also going to play a big role in our work to help build the metaverse. We just announced our AI Research SuperCluster, which we think will be the world's fastest supercomputer once it is complete later this year. This is going to enable new AI models that can learn from trillions of examples and understand hundreds of languages – which will be key for the kinds of experiences that we’re building. Looking ahead, we’re focused on further scaling our computing power and transforming our AI infrastructure through advances in foundational research, as well as improvements to data center design, networking, storage, and software.”
Last year, I started looking at how technology has impacted democracy and broke it up into a few phases. First was the utopian step when most people thought the Internet would be the great democratizer. Then starting on May 9, 2016 (the day of the Philippines election and the trending topics controversy at Facebook), we started moving into the reckoning phase, where we began to realize the downside of the Internet. I then had us moving into a regulatory stage which I think will last just the next year or so, and I think this week starts to transition us again into a new phase of disruption. I jotted down so many things to write about as things were unfolding that I’m going to try to thread them all together here.
A phase of disruption is right. Since this time, we’ve seen not just everything AI, but Elon taking over Twitter, layoffs, and so much more. I recently listened to Brene Brown’s interview with futurist Amy Webb about the Super Cycle we are in with AI, wearable devices like Meta’s Ray-Bans, and biotechnology. She has some great points about needing to be prepared for anything, not everything, and that there is no excuse not to do long-term planning in this age of rapid change.
First, I hope that this week truly starts to shift the conversation away from just focusing on Facebook and continues to broaden how integrity issues - especially content moderation - are problems for numerous platforms and industries. The Joe Rogan/Spotify incident shows this. I appreciate how Spotify, Rogan, and people like Brené Brown acted during this. Rogan seemed sincere in his apology, and all we can do now is see if he truly changed. Brown modeled what it looks like to pause, listen and then respond. This is how we should want people to act when they realize that they need to change.
Moreover, to me, this is the market working. Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have every right to walk away if they don’t like Spotify’s actions. Same with users. And, Spotify should have to face the consequences of their decisions about which content they choose to pay for. This is another example of how society is working out what our new norms should be for content on the Internet. Also, if I were Apple and iHeartRadio, I’d be making plans for what I’m going to do when people decide to focus on the fact that they still carry Steve Bannon’s podcast. They aren’t paying him, but that’s a situation just waiting to explode.
I think this is happening, though much of the attention is still on the big companies. I think how different platforms handle content will increase scrutiny as we get closer to the election. Most recently, Substack went through what Spotify did in early 2022.
Second, the regulatory environment is getting interesting as well. The U.S. pushing back on the E.U. for their regulation is an exciting polarity the administration is trying to hold while still supporting antitrust measures here at home. The Senate has now aggressively moved two bills out of committee, and there’s this feeling that they want to try to rush something before everyone turns to the midterms. I’m not confident something will happen in the U.S. Clearly, Mark feels the same as U.S. regulation was only passively addressed by him in the earnings call when he kept making the point about how TikTok is a competitor - but he did specifically call out the regulation in the E.U. Plus, if Facebook’s stock keeps going down, it’s flirting with going below the market cap threshold some of these bills have.
Third, I hope that Facebook’s earnings don’t deflate the balloon and urgency to fix these problems on social media platforms. Just because Facebook lost a few million users does not mean that it still has a tremendous impact on society - especially outside the United States. I’m worried that this Silicon Valley shift to focus on crypto, blockchain, NFTs, and the metaverse will move so fast that they fail to think about how to do this transition responsibly. I’d like to hear more from the companies about how they are ensuring that they just aren’t abandoning where the problems are while they continue to try to innovate.
Notice how I didn’t even mention AI? 🤯 Wild. Obviously, the situation at the federal level hasn’t changed much beyond the TikTok bill. Different story at the state level, in the EU, and elsewhere worldwide.
Fourth, on the flip side of transitioning responsibly, one of the things I’ve been grappling with is wondering if I’m holding on too much to how we used to do things at the company - Crowdtangle, Civic Integrity, elections, etc. - and am I doing enough to embrace any changes that might need to be done to face our current realities. This thread on Twitter by Steven Sinofsky has an interesting take on Facebook reallocating resources. I don’t have any answers here, but it’s on my mind because I worry that current regulation is too focused on how things were versus where they are going.
I still have this worry that current regulation is reactionary vs forward looking, but that’s also the nature of making laws. The part at the top about wondering if we are holding on too hard for how companies used to do things - especially - trust and safety is very much on my mind right now. I still think both personally and collectively we are not doing enough to pull ourselves out of the ruts we’ve gotten ourselves into these past several years to prepare for and make changes for where things are going.
Fifth, I found Mark’s insight about how many people are moving away from sharing in the feed to sharing content in smaller groups of people via messenger apps. They are then consuming content via things like stories or reels. Given end-to-end encryption on many of these messaging apps and how content like stories is ephemeral, this will make tracking mis and disinformation exponentially harder.
This still remains the case. I'm not sure how many people noticed that in the most recent Meta earnings, but Mark made a few points related to this section.
First, WhatsApp usage in the U.S. continues to grow.
Second, they tend to see volatility in Meta stock when they are at this point of the product playbook where they are investing in scaling something but haven’t yet monetized it.
Third, Mark said, “right now, about 30% of the posts on Facebook feed are delivered by our AI recommendation system. That's up 2x over the last couple of years. And for the first time ever, more than 50% of the content people see on Instagram is now AI recommended. AI has also always been a huge part of how we create value for advertisers by showing people more relevant ads, and if you look at our two end-to-end AI-powered tools, Advantage+ Shopping and Advantage+ App Campaigns, revenue flowing through those has more than doubled since last year.”
This sticks out to me because it shows how people are seeing less and less content from the people and pages they choose to follow. That can be for a variety of reasons—I’m guessing one is that people are creating less content—but this changes the conversation about how platforms surface content to people and how you prevent harmful content from appearing.
Finally, my former colleague Crystal Patterson said this on Twitter yesterday, but this is an excellent example of why Facebook - and all apps - focus on growth. If they don’t, the market is going to respond. In some ways, this inflection point for the company might give them a breather of always being in the spotlight and give them a chance to see if they can make this pivot work. Then again, we also have to make sure we don’t just start ignoring them altogether.
I’m curious to see what the next six months to a year hold. I remember in 2012 how campaigns complained about how there were tools like custom audiences that didn’t exist at the beginning of the year that was critical for them as Election Day approached. Given how fast Facebook and Silicon Valley move, we need to stay on top of this very carefully because what we think might be issues for the midterms today may very well not be.
Well, I was wrong about new issues and tools emerging for the midterms but very right about how quickly the issues we think we might face in an election would change. This is further proof that while things might seem quiet now, they could change in an instant, and we need to be prepared.
Please support the curation and analysis I’m doing with this newsletter. As a paid subscriber, you make it possible for me to bring you in-depth analyses of the most pressing issues in tech and politics.