Tag: Facebook

Must-Read: Jay Rosen: Facebook Backs Off on the View from Nowhere

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Jay Rosen: Facebook Backs Off on the View from Nowhere: “Today Facebook released a document it calls: News Feed Values. It’s a start…

…For a long time Facebook wouldn’t even say it had priorities. It would describe you as the editor of News Feed: you, rather than Facebook…. But… we want to know: what are you optimizing for, along with user interest? How do you see your role within a news ecosystem where you are more and more the dominant player? In news, you have power now. It is growing. Help us understand how you intend to use it. What kind of filter will you be? What kind of player… playing for what? The document released today is not a revelation, but it does say a few interesting things. Here is my summary of News Feed’s editorial philosophy:

Your social graph comes first, not the public world. Informing you is a higher priority than entertaining you. But we think ‘information’ comes in many forms, not just serious news. A good recipe for beer can chicken is information to the person who is looking for it. We don’t exclude points of view we don’t like, or favor the sources we do like. We let the invisible hand of user choice make those decisions. Except: We do try to edit out what people find misleading, sensational, spammy–mere click bait. We do police nudity, hate speech, personal abuse, and violent or overly graphic content….

No one should expect Facebook to be a traffic distributor because that is not a priority the company has for its product…. One more thing Facebook says… its committed to the personalization of News Feed as a kind of right that users have. ‘You control your experience.’ I will be worth watching how this rights revolution in news display unfolds…

Must-read: Henry Farrell: “Facebook’s Algorithms Are Not Your Friend”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Ordinarily, buyers and sellers in a marketplace have a partial harmony of interests. All want to make a win-win deal. But all also want to, conditional on the deal being made, reduce the amount of surplus received by their counterparty by as much as they can. The interest vectors have a positive dot product. But they are not aligned.

However, when what is being sold is not the service to the user but rather the user’s eyeballs to an advertiser who may want to inform the user and may want to distort the user’s cognition and worsen his or her judgment, even the partial harmony of interest goes up for grabs. And now Henry Farrell is annoyed at Alex Tabarrok’s transfer of what was originally a valid intuition outside of its proper sphere:

Henry Farrell: Facebook’s Algorithms Are Not Your Friend: “Alex’s more fundamental claim–like very many of Alex’s claims…

…rests on the magic of markets and consumer sovereignty. Hence all of the stuff about billions of dollars ‘making its algorithm more and more attuned to our wants and needs’ and so on. But we know that the algorithm isn’t supposed to be attuned to our wants and needs. It’s supposed to be attuned to Facebook’s wants and needs, which are in fact rather different. Facebook’s profit model doesn’t involve selling commercial services to its consumers, but rather selling its consumers to commercial services. This surely gives it some incentive to make its website attractive (so that people come to it) and sticky (so that they keep on using it). But it also provides it with incentives to keep its actual customers happy–the businesses who use it to advertise…

Must-read: Sheryl Sandberg: “From Facebook Q4 2015 Results–Earnings Call Transcript”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Via Ben Thompson: Sheryl Sandberg: From Facebook Q4 2015 Results–Earnings Call Transcript: “Our third priority is improving the relevance and effectiveness of our ads…

…We shipped a lot of new ad products this past year. These products help deliver personalized marketing at scale and drive business for our clients. Leading up to Black Friday Shop Direct, the UK’s second largest online retailer teased upcoming sales with a cinemagraph video to build awareness. They then retargeted people who saw the video with one day only deals. On Black Friday, they used our carousel and DPA ads to promote products people had shown interest in. They saw 20 times return on ad spend from this campaign, helping them achieve their biggest Black Friday and their most successful sales day ever…