The Rise and Fall of Social Media Empires: Meta (Facebook), Part 1 Podcast Transcript

FaceMash, The Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Meta... is the Threads flop the end of an era?  In this three-part series, we go back to where it all started and trace Facebook's early successes and controversies. This episode starts with FaceMash and the series of good decisions that allowed Facebook to surpass Myspace as the most visited social media website in 2008.

Taryn Ward  Hi, I'm Taryn Ward 

Steven Jones  and I'm Steven Jones,

TW.  and this is Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines. 

SJ.  We're taking a closer look at the core issues around social media, including the rise and fall of social media empires, to better understand the role that social media plays in our everyday lives and society.

TW.  Today we'll start to take a look at Meta, which is important because it's really the first time we started to look at the existing social media landscape in real time, rather than solely or primarily looking back at what's already happened in this space.  This is a longer story to tell, so we'll break it up into three episodes. To start, we'll look back at Facemash, The Facebook, how Mark Zuckerberg successfully navigated some of the early challenges and controversies and Facebook's two most important acquisitions, Instagram and WhatsApp.  Before we take a closer look at some of Facebook's more recent controversies, including Cambridge Analytica, finally, we'll look at Facebook's rebrand to Meta and the launch of Threads and consider what it's likely to mean for Meta's future.

TW.  We'll start, as always, with the core question: Could this be the end for Meta?  For once there's a fairly straightforward answer here, probably not.  Despite a tough couple of years of losses in the Metaverse and being outshone by new competitors, and of course, the collapse of Threads and a looming cage match.  From WhatsApp to Instagram to Facebook, there's a lot of runway left to move fast and break things.

TW.  Normally, we would take some time to describe the relevant features of the social media network at issue.  But because we're really talking about four networks, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, and because, at this point, virtually everyone has some understanding of how these networks function, we'll skip that bit.  We certainly have enough other ground to cover.  Suffice to say Facebook comfortably fits our working definition of a social media network to the point that one might begin to suspect it played a large role in framing it.

Let's start with Facemash, let's bring ourselves all the way back to 2003.  Mark Zuckerberg is a student at Harvard.  This is how it worked: students were presented with two photos side-by-side and asked which one was more attractive.  I'll read you a blog entry that Mark Zuckerberg wrote that night; and this is a quote, “Some of the people have pretty horrendous Facebook pics, I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

SJ.  So, when you hear him say something like that, and whilst, you know, we talk about pictures of people, what we're really talking about, I suppose, is pictures of, you know, young female students at Harvard.  How does that make you feel, Taryn? Because you were either in college or had just left college?  I can’t remember how old you are, and I definitely don't want you to say.

TW.  Thank you for that!  Yeah, I was still young.  I mean, I think back then, I don't think I would have found anything shocking about that, and I don't mean that in a positive way. I think I think this exercise would have felt unsurprising, not very imaginative, and just sort of like a dumb thing.  Some guys I didn't like very much thought up when they were bored and lonely, and somehow they turned it into something that it is today, which, you know, fair play is incredible. But I think your core point, you know, asking me to talk about my feelings, which I'll avoid every day that ends in a Y it is there is something really uncomfortable about it. And I think it wasn't actually until I had children of my own that I really started to think about these things in a different way. Because it's sort of one thing to accept that the world objectifies me. It's another to accept that they do that to my daughters.

SJ.  Yeah, I mean, that's my thought as well. Now, you know, I have very attractive daughters, as do you.  You know, it is because I have a daughter that around this age, I find this deeply, deeply offensive, and maybe I wouldn't back in 2003. I mean, the times were very different. This was definitely pre- “Me Too”, and the world, thankfully, has moved on in the last 20 years. 

I'm not sure that it's moved on as much as we think that I think, you know, this attitude has largely been driven underground on social media, and I think we probably dig into this and some of the future episodes about the impact that apps like Facebook and Instagram, particularly how on women's self-image and the way that men interact with them.  But objectively, saying something like this tells you an awful lot about the mental state of somebody who's founded the largest social media empire in the world and is, by any measure, one of the richest and most influential people on the planet. And I don't like him when I read that quote, and I don't see a lot of evidence that he is significantly matured, although, as you said, they build a great product. And he has navigated some interesting challenges.

TW.  I think that's a really great point, and I think, you know, of course, we can all appreciate that, you know, we may have done and said some stupid things when we were young people, some things that maybe we wish were not recorded and discussed by podcasters, 20 years later.  Still, I think our mistakes at that age can tell us something about who we were, not necessarily the size of the mistakes, but maybe the nature of them, and I'm not sure he would say that this was a mistake. I don't, to my knowledge, he's not publicly commented on this, but apologies if I've gotten that wrong. And I think it says a lot about it explains a lot rather about the current offerings under the Meta umbrella. You know, now, compared to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg seems almost reasonable. But it is worth remembering how Meta started and thinking about how other social networks started, and how this really ties to their functionality and the experience, but also how they grew, and how ultimately they came to an end.

SJ.  Yeah, he's interesting, and I mean, I think Facebook, Facebook was very different than Twitter, and we talked about how I've never really used MySpace or many of the other early social networks. But Twitter was about, umm, things which were absolutely current and extremely pithy, and we'll dive into that more in future episodes. But Facebook was really about connecting with friends, and we talked about previously how this sort of took over from Six Degrees and, you know, Friendster as a way of reconnecting with people. And, you know, it was quite good at that. I mean, obviously, it was very good at it, because it became the largest effective country on Earth very quickly, I remember the headlines when they happened. It started his way of connecting people at Harvard, its purpose now is very, very different. And I think, you know, that's part of what we're going to talk about in this series of podcasts is how it went from linking people. And I think if I remember the story right, the problem was that the system that they had at Harvard for sort of like knowing who else was at Harvard, in your year in your class was just really bad. And these guys thought that they had an opportunity to market opportunity to build something to connect people. So, they evolved into this. So, yeah, it's it is gonna be really interesting to sort of like track this journey and see where it's going. As you said, I don't think it's the end of Facebook yet, but he does seem to be having a bit of a crisis.

TW.  No, I, exactly. So, so Facemash, which predates Facebook and even The Facebook, was really not about connecting people. It was just about playing this game, "Hot or Not", essentially. The Facebook, which this is a good lead into sort of the next step, was an attempt to do that. So, Facebook's were sort of, you know, these yearbooks, but they weren't online. And so, The Facebook, as it was called, initially, was built sort of on top of this, you know, quirky early success of Facemash. And it was an attempt to create a universal online Facebook student directory. So, there would be a photo and basic information for each student at Harvard that you could access, you know, quickly online, on your computer for the whole school, not just for your dorm, not just for your class, but for everyone. And I think it is really important that, you know, we link The Facebook to Facemash because The Facebook, you could argue, was an attempt to connect people in some ways, but Facemash really wasn't. And so, I think if we start there, if we start the story with The Facebook, we actually miss something really important.

SJ.  Yeah, yeah, you've missed the fundamental objectification of, let's face it, very young women because this was obviously going to be played out, you know, against women who are 18-to-21, essentially, which is, you know, absolutely bloody horrendous, and definitely would not be acceptable today, um, you might not be thrown out, particularly from places like Harvard where money talks, but you wouldn't be very popular with your fellow students for doing things like this.

TW.  Well, and to be fair to Harvard, Zuckerberg faced potential expulsion for these antics.  That was not off the table.  But you know, that was that was probably the earliest controversy was: “Is he going to be kicked out of school for creating this thing?”. And then the next one, of course, was the claim that he stole the idea for The Facebook from someone else, but we'll we'll get there eventually.  

I think before we before we get too far into those controversies. We should, you have to really talk about the early appeal in those wins that they had, because this did strike a chord. And whether there's the separation between Facemash and The Facebook, or not, I think he, he touched something that people really, he touched on something that people really wanted. People wanted to connect, they wanted to be able to see each other online and interact in this way. So, the potential for this was almost immediately obvious. They expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale, all by March of 2004, and then they quickly expanded to several other universities. 

In 2005, they switched from The Facebook to Facebook and expanded availability further to high schools. By 2006, Facebook was available to the general public, obviously, huge, huge growth after that, and just to note, for those of you who weren't there or who don't remember early Facebook, there was still no smartphones, the Internet was still slow and unreliable by today's standards, and cameras were still separate from phones.  So, some phones maybe had cameras, but they were terrible, you know, you would carry around a separate digital camera.  You know, it was it was a whole process of adding photos.  So, it was a very, very different experience, and competition was minimal.  You know, Facebook, the offering early on was different enough to MySpace and others that it was a really unique offering with wide appeal.

SJ.  I mean, it was it was very different, and when did you join?

TW.  I joined. So, actually, a friend made my account, in 2005, I found this whole thing really, really embarrassing and didn't want to be part of it.  I didn't even own a digital camera then, and I wasn't, and I'm still not, very good at taking photos. But I really wasn't then, so a friend made me this account largely so that she could tag me in photos, I think, and it was a while before I even claimed my account. That probably violates actually the terms and service agreements. So, if my Facebook account disappears after this, you'll know somebody important was listening.  But by the time I joined, it was you know, it was pretty widespread.  I was not one of those first, super early users, and I used it sort of with a measure of disdain even then, not because I was too cool.  But mostly, I think, because I didn't really get it. It wasn't an objection to how it started or anything like that because I had no idea Facemash was the precursor. It was just it didn't have a lot of initial appeal to me. But it would soon, how about you?  When did you join?

SJ.  I joined, I think, around 2008, when it was just, you know, starting to really take off, and, you know, I was obviously in Canada, and I was working, running a research team. And I just heard about it from some of the people I worked with and soaps. I remember sitting one night, as you say, on the on the desktop, signing up for it and sort of reaching out and making those first friends, you know, searching for people that you knew because none of those suggestions systems were really were there or functioning. They just didn't have the capacity, and, you know, you uploaded this profile picture.  I think that was possibly about the limit of it, and so it was it was a very different experience, and to be honest, I preferred it to the Facebook that we have today, and I think possibly I'm not alone in that.  But it's 2008, and I quickly rose to have something like added about 41 friends on Facebook.  It's far, far more than that.  But I mean, the reality is that most of those contacts rather than, you know, close friends. 

TW.  Yeah, I think your point about liking it more then, than now is an important one.  It was a different place, not just because there were no smartphones, but it was a really low commitment, and you know, compared to some of the other offerings, which we've covered in previous episodes, like MySpace, for example, if there was really no thought required to design the page, there was no expectation that you were going to create something that was really beautiful or appealing.  You just sort of entered your name, and you were expected to use your real name and your email address and password and sort of could go on your way at my photo for a long time, and it was a question mark, which made people very annoyed, and eventually, I did add a photo. I think when I went to law school, I felt like I needed to have something that was slightly more personal.  But it was nice because it did have a neater appearance than MySpace. It was all simplified and back then there were no ads.  MySpace had become papered with scammy-looking ads, and it felt messy, and Facebook was more text-based. So, there was something that almost was a callback to AOL Instant Messenger, and so, it was a little bit like AOL Instant Messenger with this potential to meet new people in the network. And there was no pressure to be creative. All those things were sort of in its favour. And I think there was also this sort of vague sense of exclusivity, maybe because it started at Harvard, maybe because initially, you needed a university email address. But there was this sense of, you know, that we were special because we were on this network.

SJ.  I mean, I think that that sort of helps, right, with the initial marketing, that it's, you're part of the in-crowd, and I think much later on, we'll talk about the danger that has presented to society and the mental health of individuals. But, you know, in 2008, it was very easy to do. And because you had to log on to your desktop, you weren't on it all the time, you updated it a couple of times a week, probably, they didn't have a messenger, yet there was no way to chat to people in real time. There were other ways of doing that, obviously. And I remember when you were talking about sort of not having a profile and not really engaging in it, it made me think of the 2009 film, he's just not that into you. And I think there was a character in that that didn't have a profile. And it drove the girl and her friends absolutely insane because they couldn't see what he was doing online. And, you know, that became a part of the part of the purpose, right, it's creeping people on social media, which is, is also, you know, whilst helpful, in some ways, not great in others. Yeah, it is really interesting. But the thing, which, for me, I thought was really cool, was when they opened up the architecture and allowed people like Farmville to have like the simple, quite silly games that you could play through their system, which started to build this sort of programme into a platform which was attached to other stuff. And I like many of my compatriots were sort of like absolutely nuts about Farmville for a while and harvesting our strawberries every two hours for each was clever, because it got you into the app.  If you want, If you planted something, you had to go into the app to harvest that, which was absolutely genius, and they didn't really have to do any of the work because then you did that, right? So, pretty clever. Were you a Farmville or a games person? I suspect you were far too serious as a law student. 

TW.  Yeah, no, I think that's true. I wasn't I wasn't having much fun. I think Farmville came a little bit later, I think I was done with school by then or it was towards the end.  But 2008 was a great time to join Facebook, Facebook had another important addition other than you, Steve, Sheryl Sandberg joined Facebook in 2008 as their CFO, and they became cashflow positive or claim to be there's some scepticism about whether this was actually true.  But you know, I don't I don't know the facts here.  They claimed to be cashflow positive in September of 2009.  So, really, not long after she came on board, and in 2008, a couple of other big things happened.  Facebook surpassed MySpace as the most visited social media website, which was a huge, huge milestone for them, and that was great, but not everything was rosy in 2008, there were a few other things happening, including a financial crisis that, you know, we felt the effects of long after, and some would argue we're still feeling the effects of now. So, I think it's worth just thinking about as Facebook was really sort of reaching this upswing, what else was happening?

SJ.  For people, for the younger listeners who were not really paying attention to the news, it's difficult, I think, to understand the impact that the financial crisis in 2008 has, and I think in the US, particularly it, you know, it was clear, I was travelling to and from Florida for work quite a bit, and people were just walking away from houses, you know, and everybody that I talked down, talked to down there talked about the absolute devastation and then if anybody hasn't seen it, The Big Short is well worth watching to get some sort of background to this. But you know, it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and it certainly didn't help Facebook, and I'm just wondering if this ability to connect and reach out to people from the past that these crises do they do they spawn an increase in nostalgia for “easier”, and I use that word in inverted commas? More better, you know, times in the past, and so you reached out to people who were friends from school and university and obviously that was good through Facebook's bank balance, whether they were cash positive or not.

TW.  I could understand and certainly why that would be the case. You know, I think we've talked about before that that there always seems to be a number of factors at play. At issue, and I think the social media networks, their success really depends on context and what was happening around them. There's no question though, that Facebook made a series of good decisions, both in terms of Facebook being Facebook, but also in contrast to what some others were doing. So, Facebook built features people actually wanted. They added things like Farmville, which were very popular and engaged people, and they were willing to improve things to stay relevant. In fact, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has been rumoured to be obsessive about this, about staying relevant. And they were also willing to adjust in change to accommodate and expand their audience. So, you know, they wanted to widen this umbrella and to welcome more and more people. But they managed to do this without constantly throwing new things out there. So, there was never really confusion about how things worked, or how they would work differently, or worries that, you know, things would suddenly change drastically overnight, and I think that's really not easy to do, and when we look at some of these other social media networks, and this is where they've really struggled, and Facebook did this really, really well.

SJ.  It was actually really interesting, I think, right? The there was a lot of innovation in this time, but it never felt like you were being dislocated from the way that it worked. There wasn't any huge, uncomfortable change. And I forget when they launched the first app, but it must have been within this sort of timeframe because then Apple came out with its smartphone in 2007. And I think apps were allowed the next year or the year after, and I think I got my first iPhone in 2009. And pretty soon had a Facebook app on it. So, it's been around then, and that drastically expanded the scope of the app. But again, you had a more or less consistent feel, and you didn't feel at that time. If you were using it on a desktop or a laptop that you were having a different experience. It was still sort of it was okay.  I think, you know, we can talk about in a bit whether they managed to keep that going.  But they did manage this growth and transition really well, and let's be honest, they did when they surpassed MySpace, a massive milestone, and they just kept growing faster and faster and faster for a long, long time.

TW.  Yes, in the mobile point is really important, because Mark Zuckerberg is obsession, if you can call it that with innovation and staying relevant is pretty well known. It's something that is sort of the stuff of legend. But that transition to mobile, it was, it was not clear that it was going to work for Facebook, for there's a pretty extended period where it just wasn't clear that they are going to be able to make that jump, that they were going to be relevant with a world where people focused on smartphones and apps and staying connected that way. 

So, what did he do? He made some really great acquisitions, and some of this, I think, was about hedging bets. Whether it was Instagram in 2012 or WhatsApp in 2014.  These were really this period was when they made their biggest and most important acquisitions.  We won't talk about the Metaverse, which wasn't an acquisition, but a series of acquisitions, and of course, Threads they built themselves, but you know, this was all part of this idea that the world is changing, and we're gonna stay on top of it one way or another.

SJ.  I don't think anybody can argue how successful the acquisition of WhatsApp and, err, Instagram turned out to be for Facebook. I mean, we can argue about whether they were good for everybody else. And for the experience, generally, and I think we might, we might talk about those later.  But it was a brilliant business decision, and it cost a lot of money. I think, you know, Instagram wasn't what it is now. But it was not, it was already a big thing. It grew incredibly fast from its launch in 2010, and it was a, you know, a threat to Facebook's business model, and even what 10 years ago, Facebook was becoming less cool for young people than it had been for those who had been on it since the beginning. So, Instagram was a was a way of making sure you didn't lose those, that demographic, I think, and what's that was an interesting one, because they didn't they'd already built their messenger app. Right? So, you had Facebook Messenger. But then they acquired this additional messenger system. And that was that was an interesting one. And I must admit that not being that interested in social media at that time. I did wonder the logic of that, but obviously, they knew what they were doing, because that worked out extremely well.

TW.  Well, good news. Next time, we'll talk more about Facebook's acquisitions, including WhatsApp and how those acquisitions helped to shape the existing social media landscape right along with Facebook. In the meantime, we'll post a transcript of this episode with references on our website. You can find and listen more information about us at TheBrightApp.com.

SJ.  Until next time, I'm Steven Jones,

TW.  and I'm Taryn Ward.

SJ.  Thank you for joining us for Breaking the Feed, Social Media: Beyond the Headlines.