I recently read this press release from the European Commission:
“The Commission’s investigation indicates that Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults.”
That made me think of the following quote from Mark Zuckerberg during Meta’s Q3 2024 earnings call on October 30, 2024:
“Improvements to our AI-driven feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram this year alone.”
Later, during a follow-up call for the same earnings report, Meta CFO Susan Li said: “We’re still seeing strong returns as improvements to both engagement and ad performance translate to revenue gains. I think Mark mentioned that this year the ranking improvements we’ve made have delivered an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook, a 6% increase on Instagram.”
I think Zuckerberg and Li make the relationship pretty clear. They are not even trying to hide it — and I suppose it is not a secret at all: The more time users spend on Facebook and Instagram, the more money Meta makes.
Based on these quotes, Meta seems to be very good at optimizing for increased time spent on its platforms. In fact, it almost sounds as though they have a dial in their AI recommendation systems that they can turn to increase the amount of time users spend on their services.
I do not have the exact numbers, but it would not surprise me if the increase in time spent that Zuckerberg mentions — at Meta’s scale — translates into more than 100 million additional hours per day.
One hundred million hours a day.
I wonder how that time is being spent. Doomscrolling?
I also wonder how well Meta understands what users are doing during that additional time — and what other activities its apps are competing with. I imagine they are competing with time spent building IRL relationships, doing productive work, exercising and, yes, even sleeping.
At this scale, could you argue that improvements to AI recommendation systems like this are simply pulling productivity out of Western economies by encouraging people to engage with social media instead of getting things done?
I personally believe that the business model of ad-driven social media platforms such as Meta is deeply broken.
I also believe that these companies reflect far too little on the impact they have on the world when they tweak AI systems operating at this scale to increase engagement and revenue.
Of course, I also understand the problem from Meta’s perspective. This is their entire business model, and they have investors to satisfy.
I am sure Facebook did not begin as a project designed to steal people’s time. It began as a cool app that people genuinely loved. As with many software products, retention was a useful metric because it indicated that people liked and engaged with the product. Once advertising entered the picture, however, retention became directly correlated with revenue.
The problem is that Meta has become exceptionally good at optimizing for retention, using AI and world-class product teams.
It also seems likely to me that some people inside Meta are living in a bubble in which they tell one another a positive story about the impact of their work. As a result, they may not be sufficiently in touch with — or reflective about — the real impact their business model has on the world.
In my opinion, there is no doubt that Meta’s services are addictive. I believe this business model has been taken too far.
This is a sad example of capitalism gone wrong.
At the same time, I understand the incentives behind Meta’s efforts to tell a positive story about its impact on the world. But in my opinion, the right thing for the company to do would be to honestly reflect on the negative effects of its business model and think seriously about how it could move toward more ethical sources of future growth — something that genuinely benefits society.
I believe that less aggressively engagement-optimized versions of Instagram and Facebook could become more ethical products. The problem is that it has been taken too far. I sincerely hope that EU regulation — even though it often has a bad reputation — can help show the way forward for these types of systems and products.