How Facebook grew too big to handle

Alex Schultz probably had something to do with it. The 36-year-old from south London, a Cambridge physics graduate and self-taught specialist in online marketing, moved to Silicon Valley in 2004. After three years at eBay, he was appointed to Facebook's newly formed "growth team" in 2007.

Schultz's mission – along with seven others – was to pioneer innovative techniques to lure in new users and keep them coming back for more. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and chief executive, would later describe the growth team as the platform's most important product feature. Their quasi-religious verve for using data to grow has been so successful that companies across the industry – and around the world – have copied their tactics.

When Schultz celebrated his 10th anniversary, Zuckerberg posted a message on his Facebook page. "Zuckerberg has trusted Schultz with something even more important: helping to fix Facebook.

The company calls this work "integrity". Others might call it the world's biggest clean-up. When I meet Schultz in a conference room at Facebook's campus in Menlo Park, California, his manner is cheerful and confident, even when I ask about the sustained and growing public criticism of the company.

"We absolutely missed things and we said that we are changing things," he admits. But it does not matter that the company uses data and behavioural science to addict its users. "Creating a valuable focus – we have never focused on anything for 'addiction'."

Schultz – perhaps predictably – says Facebook has the tools to fix its own problems. In fact, he sees the platform's vast size and expertise in data as key to the solution. "Having an international company that has the resources that we have, being able to apply the machine-learning tactics that we get into the world when it comes up, or a when it comes up, is really, really powerful, "he says.

But critics worry that Schultz and his growth team are the last people who should be in charge of solving the social network's problems. As one train Facebook executive told the FT: "It is perfectly reasonable to ask the question: is not it putting the foxes in the hen house?"

To understand the role of the growth team and its new mandate, the Financial Times interviewed a Facebook page. Many would only speak anonymously, for fear of the impact on their careers. They describe the growth team as a dominant force within the company that has been aggressively focused on engagement, speed and seeing off the world.

In Facebook's early days, Zuckerberg is being reported by 'shouting' domination!

"The priority at Facebook for the last decade has grown. Period. End of story, "says David Kirkpatrick, who was granted rare levels of access to the company for his 2010 book The Facebook Effect. "The pursuit of growth has blinded Mark and his team to some of the risks of rapid expansion, which are so obvious to many of us on the outside now."

Even people who are worried about the team's work and their intense focus on metrics may have caused it to miss looming problems. Not long after Schultz joined, the group worked with Danny Ferrante, one of Facebook's first data scientists, to develop a practice called "growth accounting".

Instead of just trying to find new users to join the platform, they have become obsessed with "monthly active users". This so-called "North Star" metric of commitment guided the company for more than a decade.

In a reading Schultz gave to start-up founders in 2014, he explained: "What you really need to think about, is what is the North Star of your company? . . everyone in your company is thinking about that metric and their actions towards moving that metric up? . . . Monthly active people. . . was the number [Zuckerberg] made the whole world hold Facebook to. "

Mike Hoefflinger, Head of Global Business Marketing at Facebook, says: "A North Star is also paying attention to. Sometimes it's hard to realize how important these things are. "

How today's growth team responds to Facebook's challenges of shape lives, elections and conflicts around the world. Schultz is not an expert in preventing privacy breaches such as the mbadive Cambridge Analytica data breach, stopping the spread of Russian disinformation aimed at warping US elections, or that the hate speech that has incited real-world violence and even genocide in Myanmar. But he is an expert in measuring. "We can look at data hard, we can measure how many times we are doing, we can measure false positives, we are doing so, we can measure the prevalence and measure the right way and report on them publicly. , He says.

Ultimately, he still has a Facebook userbase. I meet Schultz the day after Facebook. After stagnation and a dip in some western markets last year, they are growing again. This is a sign that Facebook's fixed are working. "I'm so proud of doing this for the last two years," he tells me. "It's been really hard, but it's going to be a bad idea. And I believe the numbers show that they are sticking around and we are doing the right things. "

Others might argue that it's exactly this logic – which rests on the belief that users always act in their own self-interest, and manage their social media use entirely rationally – that got Facebook into trouble in the first place.

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In Facebook's early days, Zuckerberg is being reported by shouting "domination!" But by 2007, he was worried that he was just three years old, the platform was growing. Schultz admits now that it seems "ridiculous" how would the world be stalled in 2007. "No social service had ever got to 100 million [users]. We were smaller than MySpace, Bebo, HighFive, "he laughs.

Zuckerberg, then just 23, responded with an innovation that spawned many others. He created the growth team to use fuel badysis. At other companies, growth was the job of marketing and PR departments. Zuckerberg prioritized data and engineering above all else. He is a highly experienced team member with a deep understanding of user behavior and re-engineer the site. They had a simple aim: more users and more of their time.

Zuckerberg put Chamath Palihapitiya, a brash executive who joined from AOL, in charge of the growth team. At company-wide meetings, Palihapitiya would be held on a table and organized by the Facebookers. "They have been four-letter-filled invectives on how we've been able to triple their efforts," one form Facebooker told the FT. The fear is that it's going to be "crush little baby Facebook in its crib", the train employee says. Palihapitiya, who left in 2011 to launch a venture capital fund called Social Capital, did not respond to the FT's request for comment.

In 2009, Zuckerberg told Business Insider's Henry Blodget that "fast move" was a "core value" at Facebook. "Everything from fast moving to fast moving," . . . nightly pushes code [to] hiring the best people who have a bias towards just pushing things very quickly. "

Schultz and two other key executives of the growth team – Javier Olivan and Naomi Gleit – are both still at Facebook and remain firmly in Zuckerberg's inner circle. Gleit, Facebook's second-longest tenured employee, was hired by Facebook in 2005 after she became so fascinated with the site that she made it to the subject of her senior thesis at Stanford. She has said that when she has joined the ranks of an employee, she has an "almost spiritual belief" that Zuckerberg was going to become an important person in the world, and in 2009 she told Newsweek: "My job is not done until literally everyone in the world is on the site. "

The most senior team member was Olivan – now a vice president of central services who reports directly to Zuckerberg. A Spanish MBA graduate, Olivan attracted Zuckerberg's attention when he created a Spanish version of the social network in his spare time. He joined in 2007 and turbocharged international growth by crowdsourcing translation of the site, saving the time and expense of employing professional translators across hundreds of countries. They could suddenly access the social network in their native language, which they did not speak English.

The growth team quickly saw success: within months, Facebook had overtaken MySpace. By carefully tracking users' interaction with the platform and using it to inform the design of the product, they were able to drive the monthly activists metric ever higher. As Zuckerberg told an audience of entrepreneurs in 2016: "We've got a huge amount of people and their patterns on the site.

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The growth team's key decisions fuelled incredible growth – but they made a Facebook article on Facebook In those early years, there was little discussion about the wider impact of social media, or it was a good idea to nudge millions of users across the world to spend more time and time on the platform.

Tristan Harris is a computer scientist and trainer who co-founded the Center for Humane Technology to push against Silicon Valley's addictive design theories. He says the industry's relentless pursuit of user time and attention – as exemplified by Facebook's "active user" metric-led to products that exploited people's weaknesses. "Growth hacking is about doing something unnatural to human social and psychological instincts," he says.

Techniques employed by the growth team – often experimentally at first – had long-term knock-on effects; tapping into people's addictive tendencies, reducing privacy or incentivising the spread of fake news. One of the first challenges in the team tackled, in 2008, provides an example. They would have registered, they would leave, and rarely return. So Facebook wanted to rush them to what Schultz and others have called "magic moment" where a user has at least 10 friends.

To do this, they created the People You May Know feature. New users were told "Facebook is better with friends" as they were pushed to allow the platform to access their contacts – then from email address books; now from smartphones. This simple tool turned the company's prospects, says one train Facebooker. "It was supremely important," he says.

But the feature – now common across many apps – warped people's social networks. Facebook acted like a "digital drug lord", Harris says, wants to spend time with these people, but because Facebook wanted new potential users.

The feature violated privacy, encouraging users to expose their friends' contact details with their permission, even if they were not on Facebook. People often did not understand that they were in contact with each other. Even insiders have done this: "In a controversial internal memo that leaked after the Cambridge Analytical revelations, Zuckerberg 's close lieutenant Andrew Bosworth described it as" questionable contact-importing practices. "

To some users, the feature is extremely invasive. In 2017, Gizmodo journalist Kashmir Hill discovered that one man had his secret biological daughter recommended to him because he still knew the couple he donated sperm to, but was not friends with them on Facebook. Psychologists' patients were recommended for each other, because their contact details were in the same address book.

People You May Know an Incredibly Successful Product, So the principles it used spread around the company. Photo-tagging encouraged people to keep returning to the site whenever they were tagged and created a deep well of data. Users were able to tag the photos of users they were not yet Facebook friends with, or who were not even on the network – another recruitment tool, as these contacts would have to join the platform to see the photos.

When the social networks of the social networks, the company worked on the same premise. People could expose their friends' data, usually without realizing it. This stored up trouble to the Cambridge Analytica. The Academic Aleksandr Kogan Collected vast troves of information and given to the data badytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign. Only 250,000 people took his survey in 2014 by capturing the information on their friends, he managed to collect 87 million users.

"There was absolutely a conflict with privacy," says a former Facebook executive.

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Early in 2009, the company rolled out a masterstroke: the "like" button, which kept people coming back for the possible dopamine hit of finding out their face or photograph had been "liked" by others. As Tristan Harris has written, this kind of design turns to smartphones into "slot machines" offering an addictive range of variable rewards; we endlessly check our notifications or press refresh in the hope of some kind of hit. A range of other design decisions encouraging users to stay on the site for longer: the bottomless bowl of infinite scrolling and, in 2013, videos that autoplay.

Internally, Facebook employees were not very concerned that their tactics could addict users. After all, people are still in the TV (and many still do). "We knew that addictive behavior would happen on the margins. We did not observe it at the same time as Facebook – at least in comparison to general internet addiction, "says one early Facebooker.

When Facebook saw competitors on the horizon, it would metamorphose to avoid losing users to new rivals. After Twitter gained ground in 2012 and 2013, Facebook quickly pushed the sharing of news on its own platform, encouraged more public conversations and adopted hashtags. Kirkpatrick says the company is rapidly expanding its definition of the world. "In retrospect, many things have changed, political difficulty in particular," he says.

Facebook users are now becoming more and more popular on the site for news: two-thirds of US users today say they get news from social media. Twitter also has problems policing fake news and bots, but on Facebook, disinformation can be particularly hard to spot, as people tend to connect primarily with friends and family. These bubbles, clickbait, fake news and disinformation can spread quickly and easily with no one to fact-check them (this problem is even more extreme on WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired in 2014).

Zuckerberg seems to have had an overly optimistic view of human behavior that predicted some of the negative consequences of "just pushing things very quickly". In an interview with Time in 2010, when he was named Person of the Year, he said: "I really do think there is this concept where the best stuff spreads." best stuff "is not what spreads quickest. In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, more people are involved with the top fake news stories than with real news stories. Stories that inspires outrage or fear are among the most likely to be clicked, commented on and reshared, and their high levels of commitment will be prioritized by Facebook's algorithm-driven news feed.

Schultz argues that the team would have done things differently if it was only focused on "short-term tactical wins". He praises the team for asking users' permission to access more of their data, even when they are not required by the operating system. "It will be useful if they are safe, they are not harbaded, their information is secure, and if we are fighting abuse," he says. "That's what guides this team's work."

But another form of Facebook Facebook Twitter Facebook Twitter Facebook Twitter Facebook LinkedIn "I say, 'Yes, it's what you stand for, your metrics are geared to more time on the platform,'" he says.

Facebook sells itself to advertisers as a fantastic medium for influencing people's choices – and along with Google, it now dominates the digital advertising market.

Judy Estrin, an internet pioneer and serial entrepreneur, says disinformation comes more from an "intended use" than a "negative consequence" of the platform. "The platform taps into people's emotional reactions to manipulate them: that is essentially what advertising is about – messaging and persuasion – and this is at a new level of scale. Disinformation is using the same tools with malicious intent, "she says.

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When Facebook reaches a billion users in the autumn of 2012, Schultz and Olivan celebrated with champagne. Every office was filled with balloons and the company released a video comparing the social network to a chair, a doorbell and an airplane. Facebook, in case it was not clear, connected people – and had become part of the furniture.

"It was a party, a big f *** ing deal," says one form Facebook executive. "It had taken Microsoft almost 26 years to reach a billion Windows users and 12 years for Google Search to do the same.

Naomi Gleit, Facebook's second-longest tenured employee, told an interviewer: 'My job is not done until everyone is on the world'

Facebook was a public company, after a first public offering in May 2012. Growth was even more important as investors were worried about it. Monthly active users, then daily active users, became more widely known on Wall Street – and the growth team became accountable to remote shareholders, as well as Zuckerberg.

The people who did spot problems were often ignored. Many of the train Facebook employees who spoke to the FT featured a culture where it was hard to challenge the outstanding growth team. "It was like Game Of Thrones, "Says one. "The growth team was certainly put on a pedestal. . . They were jockeying to show how close they are to Mark, who gives the most recent presentation or understands the way he thinks. "

Another former employee says they had a voice about the products – but often lost the argument. The growth team's attitude was "active animosity". "It was 'You're going to be driven out of the company, you're a danger to the company, you're not team players,'" he told the FT. "Facebook empowered the wrong people and disempowered people. When pushing to shove, oftentimes growth won. "

One such conflict becomes public when the UK has published its lawsuit, late last year. In a February 2015 email, Michael LeBeau, a Facebook product manager, wrote that the growth team was planning to ask for their closest friends. LeBeau comments: "This is a pretty high risk thing to do from a PR perspective, but it seems that the growth team will charge ahead and do it." Facebook made the change.

Outside the company, the chorus of critics began to win from 2011 onwards. Privacy activists such as the Austrian Schrems pushed regulators to examine how the company handled data. In the US, the Anti-Defamation League called on Facebook to remove hate speech from the platform. Sherry Turkle wrote about how social media addiction was warping relationships.

Facebook's policy team is often criticized by the public as being a group of people. Eli Pariser, who's been talking about the term "filter bubble" and worried about its implications for society, told the FT that he felt Facebook had a "level of overconfidence". The focus on a few metrics made it hard for Facebook to see all the "wildly different" media experiences it was creating for people, he says.

David Madden, a tech entrepreneur living in Myanmar, told PBS last year that he warned about Facebook, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, and other information in a genocide, like radio broadcasts had in Rwanda. The company's response to the problem is not simple – but he felt Facebook failed to take action. The company said it was not enough, but it was not proactive enough.

As Russia began piloting its new disinformation tactics in Ukraine in 2015, creating a model it would later deploy in the US, the Ukrainian government also warned Facebook about the problem. Facebook comments about fake news with Ukrainian officials. But Dmytro Shymkiv, deputy head of the Ukraine's presidential administration, told the FT in 2017 that "We are an open platform, we allow everybody the possibility to communicate." That's all I got ".

Schultz pushes back accusations that the growth team did not listen. He says it worked closely with others in the company, including employees in the privacy, policy and legal departments. He questions the motives of the train Facebookers who felt sidelined. "He thinks it's very interesting to look at the motives of a lot of people who have left Facebook and why they decide to say some of these things," he says. He admits that there are "tons of things" you can not understand with data alone, and says he does not push hard. But he adds: "I think I have a lot of people because they are doing things because they are doing things like that."

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Zuckerberg initially dismissed accusations that fake news on Facebook could have influence users' votes in the 2016 US presidential election, calling them "pretty crazy". But following the revelation that the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency had divisive disinformation on the platform, he apologized. Facebook admitted in October 2017 with 10 million people in the US, with 44 percent of views before the election. Zuckerberg asked his loyal lieutenants on the growth team to re-engineer the site to discourage and detect fake accounts, fake news and hate speech.

Since then, Facebook has partnered with fact-checkers to downrank stories they identify as false and cut off financially motivated fake sites from its ad network. It has taken down millions of fake accounts and campaigns originating in Russia and Iran, and now requires authentication. It has created a searchable database of political ads.

After the US presidential election, Zuckerberg's first reaction was to dismiss accusations that fake news

The company now has 30,000 people working on safety and security. It has published community standards, and it has been established with the idea of ​​an independent body. In Myanmar, it belatedly hired almost 100 Burmese language experts to research and engineering staff there.

The company has the option to "snooze" or "take a break" from some notifications, and provides a "time spent" dashboard to track their hours on site.

On privacy, it has dropped data-sharing partnerships with data brokers and cut off some developers. Earlier this month, Zuckerberg said the company would focus on creating more private platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Facebook Twitter Google Translate to: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lg=english&lg=english&lg=english&lg=en.

Many people form a partnership with Schultz that the growth team is for the same reason. Some believe it can work because its leaders are among the few who might be able to say no to Zuckerberg.

Hoefflinger believes the team's single-minded focus could be powerful when applied to integrity. "In an interesting way, [the growth team] "says Hoefflinger. "They are not going to use contact importers to improve integrity. What they will do to dedicate to a goal. "

The growth team, however, is unlikely to transform Facebook fundamentally works. It will not change the advertising business, which depends on its more than its rivals, and with the help of data to target them. It is not dramatically changing the algorithms behind the newsfeed to priority in-depth thinking, abandoning the "like" button, or ceasing from sending notifications that pull people back. People You May Know still dredges users' address books, Facebook still collects information about you, and its methods to obtain

Meanwhile, the challenges of confronting Facebook are morphing and expanding. The Christchurch terror attack was live on the platform by the attacker; in the 24 hours that followed, 1.5 million videos of the attack were uploaded to Facebook. More than 1.2 million of these were blocked at upload, yet that left 300,000 which could be seen before they were deleted. New technologies such as "deep fakes", videos where they were not able to make things happen, they could not do this Whac-A-Mole function even harder.

A recent study by social media engagement tracking firm Newsbad showed that the algorithm changes in 2018 aim at driving "more meaningful social interactions" actually ended up increasing the prominence of articles in the US.

Facebook's problems are deeply embedded in the platform and was created by Zuckerberg and his colleagues in the first few years. Roger McNamee and Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, have argued that the only thing to do is to break the company up.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of Anti-Social Media, is one such critic. But he believes even a break-up would not solve all the problems that the platform amplifies. "Thinking about the problem of Facebook is much like thinking about the problem of climate change. In many ways, it is too big to wrap our minds around, "he says.

Facebook and Governments are responding to the social network's one-by-one problems, rather than the underlying causes. Tristan Harris believes the company has created a "digital Frankenstein". "By definition, they can not control it," he says. "I think they do not want to admit that."

Hannah Kuchler covered Facebook for over five years as an FT technology correspondent based in San Francisco. She recently began a new role as FT US pharma and biotech correspondent, reporting on how technology is changing healthcare

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