'Facebook Papers' add to crisis

The Facebook Papers — internal documents taken by whistleblower Frances Haugen before leaving the company — show the social media giant knows it dominates the arenas it considers central to its fortunes. They also show Facebook did little to moderate posts in some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. It has repeatedly failed to protect its users, combat hate speech targeting minority groups and hire enough local staff to calm religious sectarianism. Only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content was detected on Instagram before it made its way onto the photo-sharing platform owned by Facebook. That compared with a 40 percent takedown rate on Facebook. Ads attacking women and the LGBTQ community were rarely flagged for removal in the Middle East. In a related survey, Egyptian users told the company they were scared of posting political views on the platform out of fear of being arrested or attacked online.

Not new, everyone knew that FB was losing teens to IG and YT long before TikTok came on the scene. Now we know by how much, and for how long. The good news though is that the late adopters, the laggards are on FB - which means they have the largest market share on social media - and the users aren't likely to switch. The bad news is that they create less content, and consume more - which ends the creation cycle of engagement (YT has more content creation than consumption and a large footprint - so it has not peaked yet.) So if FB is going to buy TikTok (what they offered Snapchat and got rejected, what they offered WA and got accepted) - it won't be allowed to. It is already too big for the FTC. So it will turn to tech assets - WhatsApp and pretend to create new ones like the Metaverse - when FB's track record of successfully creating original tech outside of FB is mixed - if you are generous. Whatever it is - FB will try not to fix FB. It is a cash cow. It represents the past. For FB to move forward, it must find new ground to move fast and break things. Sometimes they just never got round to repairing the broken stuff.

One colorful graphic showed that “time spent” for U.S. teenagers on Facebook was down 16% year-over-year, and that young adults in the U.S. were also spending 5% less time on the social network. The internal reports, some of which haven’t previously been reported, show: - Fewer teens are signing up. - Many new teen accounts are duplicates, rather than unique new users. - Users across age groups are creating fewer posts. The report was compiled by group of researchers inside Facebook for one of the company’s most powerful executives, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, in March. The paper included a series of charts and data highlighting a troubling trend that seemed to be accelerating: Facebook was losing popularity with teens and young adults. Despite detailed research, employees don’t fully understand why these trends are happening or why product changes have failed to reverse them.

As Facebook struggles to properly count uniques, never forget that its reach is based upon logins, not users per se. "Median reduction in weekly reach would be about 2.2%, and in some cases 5% to 10%". Depending of the strength of the plan, it can be significant. https://lnkd.in/euPgNzq4 #facebook #digitaladvertisingagency

Happy Friday everyone. Facebook reports their Q3 earnings next week, many eyes will be on them given developments we've been seeing about their platforms over the past month. Analysts will be watching for "bread and butter" metrics - especially ad revenue and monthly active users (MAUs). Apple's IDFA impact on FB is especially top-of-mind for analysts given its massive hit to Snap's revenues in Q3. Something else to note -- The Wall Street Journal ran another Facebook Files story yesterday about the large presence of duplicate accounts on Facebook's platforms, which may be inflating their reported user numbers - I am very curious to hear how executives on their earnings call Monday will respond to this. If MAUs are significantly off, it may affect Wall Street's sentiment about them going forward. Read more below: