What Customers Hate by Nicholas Webb

Author:Nicholas Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2022-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

As the years passed, various world leaders began using the platform as a way to communicate directly with their audiences. Sometimes they did this by engaging in what Facebook’s own Implementation Standards would call hate speech. Analysts became increasingly convinced that Facebook was putting immense effort into appearing to control its product, but only to mollify critics who were piling on the hatepoints. Mark Zuckerberg’s vague decisions about abusive world leaders made sense when viewed as an outgrowth of his business model. “The company’s incentive is to keep people on the platform,” wrote Andrew Marantz in the New Yorker in October 2020, “including strongmen and their most avid followers, whose incendiary rhetoric tends to generate a disproportionate amount of engagement.”8 For Facebook, revenues come from ads and other content that have a high level of engagement, which is exactly what provocative content generates.

Facebook survives—and thrives—because users are willing to put up with what they hate about it in order to enjoy its benefits. As Christianna Silva wrote for Mashable in March 2021, “For a lot of users, it isn’t that they don’t want to delete their Facebook accounts—it’s that Facebook has become so intertwined with the way they live online that they can’t really escape it. To leave Facebook would be to shift the way they interact with the internet. . . . Whether we want it to be or not, Facebook is now a part of our internet DNA.”9

Like many businesses that depend on a growing base of customers, Facebook has made the calculation that while it can—and should—police content that is obviously offensive to anyone, it would rather absorb the hatepoints from some users and stakeholders, including members of the US Congress who have been highly critical of the company, as a trade-off for the advertising dollars from those who love how they can benefit from the platform.

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