On January 11, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page that he was “changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.”
He warned what it would cost: “I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down.” He framed it as a trade worth making. Passively reading articles or watching videos, he wrote, “may not be as good” for people’s well-being as connecting with people they care about.
The quarterly results on January 31 showed the direction had been set before the announcement. Already in the last quarter of 2017, changes including showing fewer viral videos had cut time spent on the site by roughly 50 million hours every day. In the US and Canada, daily users fell by 700,000 from the previous quarter. Advertising revenue for the quarter was still up 48 percent from a year earlier.
Inside the company, the new goal needed a formula. According to internal documents later reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, a like was worth one point. A reaction, or a reshare with no added text, was worth five. A significant comment, message, reshare or RSVP was worth thirty. The documents also showed a motive Facebook had talked about less: comments, likes and reshares had been declining through 2017, and the change was meant to turn that around.
By the fall of 2018, BuzzFeed’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, was emailing a top Facebook official. A BuzzFeed post titled “21 Things That Almost All White People are Guilty of Saying” had drawn 16,000 comments, many of them people arguing about race. “MSI ranking isn’t actually rewarding content that drives meaningful social interactions,” he wrote. His staff, he said, felt “pressure to make bad content or underperform.”
Facebook’s researchers found publishers and political parties shifting toward outrage, because it drew comments. In an April 2019 report, they quoted one Polish party’s social media team estimating it had moved from half positive, half negative posts to 80 percent negative.
By 2020, the new number was also a test that fixes had to pass. In an April 2020 memo, Anna Stepanov, who led a team working on these problems, described briefing Zuckerberg on proposals to curb false and divisive content, including removing a boost for posts likely to be reshared down long chains. He was open to testing it, she wrote, but “We wouldn’t launch if there was a material tradeoff with MSI impact.”
Facebook disputed the larger charge. “Is a ranking change the source of the world’s divisions? No,” a spokesman, Andy Stone, said in a statement.
In August 2021, Facebook said it was “gradually expanding some tests to put less emphasis on signals such as how likely someone is to comment or share political content.” Comments and shares had been the most valuable signals in the 2018 formula.