Tuesday, December 17
At a meeting inside Facebook earlier this year, a high ranking company official revealed a concerning metric. Facebook’s users, he said, were opening the app 12 times a day, a drop from the typical 14. To him, this was a problem. But to others in the room, the idea that it was a problem was itself a problem
“When he said that I was like, ‘100% of the people who went from 14 to 12 are happy that they went from 14 to 12,’” a former Facebook product manager told me. “Only Facebook is unhappy about that.”
Since its Cambridge Analytica scandal two years ago, a chastened Facebook has worked to solve some of its many problems. It’s added fact checking to hinder fake news, a war room to protect elections, and it’s sued those who violate its policies. But according to those who’ve spent time on the inside, Facebook still hasn’t discarded its unhealthy obsession with growth — the original cause of its problems — an oversight that exposes it to further meltdowns.
At the root of Facebook’s growth obsession is a performance evaluation system that still often puts growing products at the center of how it judges employees. The company’s system asks its product managers to drive impact, which typically means moving a metric associated with growing its products — like time spent, users, active businesses, conversations — though it can vary. Performance obsessed product managers then tend to focus on driving “impact” above all else, sometimes to the point of ignoring societal consequences.
“Working at Facebook made me aware of how you can reprogram humans,” the ex–product manager said. “It's hard to believe that you could get humans to override all of their values that they came in with. But with a system like this, you can. I found that a bit terrifying.”
Facebook has tweaked its system a bit in recent years, but it didn’t make a major difference in the lives of the Facebook insiders I spoke with. If the company’s unhealthy emphasis on growth persists, it will keep opening its products to exploitation, and bad actors will inevitably exploit them, and scandal will continue to ensue. (And quite ironically, Facebook has used its size as a reason why we should be patient with it as it works to clean up its problems.)
At the heart of this story — a longer of which version we just published on BuzzFeed dot com — is a question of incentives. Though Facebook may be proficient at cleaning up its various messes, it will continue to mop them up unless it fixes what’s causing them.
