This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 13th, 2022. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Meta’s new content strategy draws its inspiration from Chinese competitor TikTok. Instead of friends, news and conversation, Facebook’s parent company is now aiming at video and entertainment.
In a dark, church-like building on the prestigious campus of Georgetown University, a large crowd of curious listeners had gathered to hear what was described as “the second act of social media.” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, stepped up to the podium with a big smile on his face.
It was autumn 2019 and Zuckerberg was heading into a new American election season. He had made up his mind not to get caught in the same crossfire he had three years earlier. Back then, Donald Trump had become president, and many were asking what role Facebook and its algorithms had played in the process.
“We’ve recently clarified our policies,” said Zuckerberg, as so often before. This time the topic was the ability to see politicians and opinion shapers in their original form, to make sure they were presented accurately.
Big words, given the volume of problems the company has had with moderation and the spread of disinformation. What he did not know at the time was that the world was about to enter a polarised era defined by a pandemic. When lockdowns and vaccinations came up for discussion, it didn’t quite turn into the open and civil conversation about the world that the Facebook chief had been hoping for.
To use Zuckerberg’s own terminology, you can describe the first act of social media as friends talking to each other online. The Facebook feed consisted of friends checking in at places and posting status updates. The second act was a bigger — and politically charged — conversation about news and current events. Links were shared and spread eagerly, and more and more material that you hadn’t explicitly followed began showing up in your feed.
There is plenty to suggest we are now moving into the third act of social media. It resembles video entertainment more than it does political debate, and takes another step away from being the meeting place for friends.
You can already start to see the changes taking place.
Facebook parent company Meta’s biggest cloud is called TikTok. The Chinese video app has become a global supersuccess by being the best in the world at presenting content it believes the user will watch. It isn’t necessarily the videos you think you want, but what is tuned to what you will actually end up consuming — even if that can be harmful, as SvD has reported previously.
On TikTok you don’t need a single friend to get relevant content served up. Instead you scroll through full-screen video and the algorithm gradually learns what works for you in particular.
Meta’s counter-move is obvious. The company is currently testing full-screen video on Instagram. Its users are already spending 20 percent of their time on the video feature Reels, which is in large part a TikTok clone. With increased emphasis on video, the photo app is coming to look more and more like its Chinese competitor.
But the shift can be found elsewhere too. At Meta’s most recent quarterly report, Mark Zuckerberg explained the change that was about to happen across all of the company’s products:
“Overall, I’m not just thinking about the artificial intelligence we are building as a recommendation system, but as an engine for discovering the most interesting content people have shared across all our systems.”
Anyone who has shared something interesting could end up in your feed. A familiar content strategy.
This third act of social media, then, looks set to become more entertaining and lighter in tone than the previous one. That would make the content easier to moderate than the news — of varying quality and truthfulness — that was spread and served as the basis for the earlier content strategy. Meta is also rumoured to be reducing and reshaping the partnerships it currently has with media companies.
The question has been sharpened by the war in Ukraine. There, Meta has had to adapt its content rules to function in the new context. On top of that, new European legislation is just around the corner, and the big platforms will need to take greater responsibility for content. Living up to that can be time-consuming, cumbersome and expensive.
Zuckerberg spoke about helping to shape the public conversation. Now it looks more like he is backing out of it entirely. But sidestepping the complexity of political questions is probably attractive, after years of missteps.
