"Facebook Gets A Facelift" 28:01

When you're running a small business, sometimes there are no words. But if you're looking to protect your small business, then there are definitely words that can help. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. And just like that, a State Farm agent can be there to help you choose the coverage that fits your needs. Whether your small business is growing or brand new, your State Farm agent is there to help. On the phone or in person. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.

Silicon Valley Bank is still the SVB you know and trust. The SVB that delivers human-focused, specialized lending and financial solutions to their clients. The SVB that can help take you from startup to scale-up. The SVB that can help your runways lead to liftoff. The only difference? Silicon Valley Bank is now backed by the strength and stability of First Citizens Bank. Yes, SVB. Learn more at svb.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.

Imagine you are on a spaceship, Iron Man-level luxury, with huge glass windows opening to the universe. In the center of this chamber is a poker table and Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, hey, Mark. Hey, what's going on? Hey, Mark. What's up, Mark? Whoa, we're floating in space? Huh? Who made this place? It's awesome. This was a scene from Zuckerberg's annual keynote at Facebook's Connect conference in October 2021, the company's biggest event of the year.

No one was actually playing poker in space. With the help of a lot of CGI, this scene was meant to visually depict Zuckerberg's new obsession: the metaverse. Zuckerberg spent the next hour detailing his plans for this future, where humans could live fully immersed in a digital world. Which sounds like science fiction, because it was literally an idea lifted from science fiction. If you've read the book Snow Crash or Ready Player One, you get the idea.

This was Zuckerberg giving the kind of classic tech optimist speech he was known for in Facebook's earlier years. But this time, it felt jarring because of the moment Facebook was actually in. I believe Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy. Earlier that month, a former Facebook product manager named Frances Haugen testified on Capitol Hill. She'd just leaked a vast trove of documents from inside the company.

The papers seemed to reveal that Facebook knew a lot more than it let on about the harms its products contributed to — from teenage mental health issues to human trafficking rings. — The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. — Zuckerberg had come out defiantly against her claims, calling them, quote, "deeply illogical." But negative headlines about Facebook were still everywhere.

The news hung over his big metaverse pitch. Facebook is one of the most used products in the history of the world. It is an iconic social media brand. But right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can't possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future. It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do.

to reflect who we are and what we hope to build, I am proud to announce that starting today, our company is now Meta. An incredible moment. One of the most powerful, controversial tech CEOs on the planet just told us he no longer wants to be associated with the thing that got him there.

It's understandable why Zuckerberg wants a fresh start. The iconic social media brand he's built over the last 18 years is now bogged down with problems. It's not just the Haugen leaks. There's also Apple choking off access to user data that powers Facebook's advertising business, the rising competitive threat of TikTok, and looming government regulation from all corners of the globe.

This is a company in an existential moment of change, fighting to keep its place in the land of the giants. I'm Shireen Ghaffari, senior correspondent for Recode by Vox. And I'm Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. Zuckerberg may already be in the future, but the rest of us are still here in the present, grappling with his company's powerful influence over the real world.

Influence that originates from one of his earliest inventions. An invention with a controversial and telling origin story. It was the first time Zuckerberg would really push his vision for connecting people at scale, regardless of the consequences, and go on to change the way that we use the internet. Part one of our seven-part series is News Feed.

In 2005, MySpace was the biggest social media company in the world. But a young engineer named Rishi Sanghwi believed in Facebook. I was their first female engineer and was also one of their first product managers. Facebook was Sanghwi's second job after graduating from Carnegie Mellon. In 2004, she was working at Oracle, a stuffy tech behemoth where it could take years for your code to make it to the real world.

Then she heard that this new startup, Facebook, had moved out of its office at Harvard and into Palo Alto, California. So she took a drive. Sangwe told us Facebook wasn't exactly rolling in the resumes. Anybody who was a user of Facebook was still in college. And anybody who was experienced thought it was a fad or trend because it was only for college students. The only people we could hire were folks that we could convince to drop out of school.

Songhui had graduated recently enough that she'd had a few months to experience Facebook on campus, and she'd used it every day. Facebook was an incredible tool. Which is actually how the company thought of itself, Songhui says.

as a utility. We actually felt as though we were serving a very important need for users, which is that if you went to a college campus and you wanted to find the students in your class, there was no real way of doing it. Unless you referenced a yearbook or campus website. And that wouldn't have the information you really wanted, like someone's relationship status or your mutual friends.

I think like 35% of our users actually put their cell phone in, so that's pretty crazy. This is a 21-year-old Zuckerberg in 2005 being interviewed by filmmaker Derek Francesi for a documentary on the millennial generation. These clips are outtakes Francesi put on YouTube. I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges. And on top of that, social applications. It's a way to have very light forms of communication with people.

Even in this early interview, this is an idea that seemed to interest Zuckerberg: lightweight social interaction, like pokes and adding friends. Instead of grabbing a drink with a friend every week, you could let them know you were thinking about them with a little internet nudge. What are the implications now of having a broader world where you can stay in touch with more people but have the same amount of time to do so? What Zuckerberg is identifying here was Facebook's early superpower. Every profile was tied to a real identity. That meant real connection.

It was also much simpler than other social platforms like, say, Myspace. Facebook was quickly becoming the directory for your crushes, acquaintances, classmates, nemeses — everyone was there.

There was one problem, though. Zuckerberg was not satisfied with the early Facebook homepage. I don't know if you guys remember what Facebook was in 2004, but it essentially was like, you know, static profile picture. It had like four links on it, view profile, view friends, and that was it.

You'd just browse around. You'd look up friends and see what had changed on their profile, what interests had changed or who'd written on their wall. This is Zuckerberg in 2016, describing the original version of Facebook. His problem with it was all that tiresome browsing left room for you to miss things and for people to miss you. If you wanted to share something with the world, you put it on your profile, but there's no real guarantee that anyone was going to see it.

So Zuckerberg came up with an idea for a new kind of homepage, a page that acts as a central, updating feed of your friend's activity. Instead of clicking through, like, tens of hundreds of profiles a day to find out what was going on, we would collate all that information from your network, which you were already privy to, and put that on your homepage like a newspaper. A personal newspaper. A newsfeed.

This was a new idea. Other prominent social networks like Myspace or Friendster, they didn't have anything like a feed. It only feels so intuitive and familiar a concept to us now, really, thanks to Zuckerberg.

Sangwe was assigned to build out the first version of News Feed, along with a few other young engineers. Her team included Andrew Bosworth and Chris Cox, names you might recognize because they're now two of the top executives at Meta. I mean, it's kind of fascinating that, like, you know, three engineers back then were building, like, one of the largest distributed systems that had ever been built.

And it was literally our first or second jobs out of school. And we didn't realize what we were doing as we were continually building the system. And they were continually building that system with deep involvement from Zuckerberg himself. Mark would use it every day and then give us feedback on like, you know, based on like what he thought he should see versus what he was seeing in his newsfeed. Sangwe told us that at first, newsfeed ranked content by its story type. Every type had a different weight decided by the team.

The weightiest, or the stuff you'd be shown first, were stories about you. Posts from friends on your wall. Tagged photos. Facebook's algorithm was basically trying to think ahead on your behalf. This is stuff you'd look up first anyway, right? Updates to your profile. Over time, this ranking system would evolve into something much more complex. But by early September 2006, this intuitively ranked news feed was ready for launch, which the team scheduled for...

Today, when you think of product launches, like you never like just push out a launch in the middle of the night to your entire user base. You try to like, you know, phase it out. You do an A-B test. You do user tests, etc. We didn't have any of that information in hindsight. But we, you know, we were just so excited to launch a product that we launched it in the middle of the night. Sangwe was the one to announce the news feed to the world with a post titled, Facebook gets a facelift. I mean, Facebook gets a facelift? Yeah.

Come on. It sounds ridiculous in retrospect. But in the moment, it was exciting. And then we celebrated with bottles of really cheap champagne. And then we were just observing the logs to make sure that nothing was broken, that people were able to access it, that people were able to use it. And happily went home, you know, thinking that everything was fine.

I just remember waking up one morning and Facebook had launched a new feature that I didn't like all that much. When Northwestern junior Ben Parr fired up his Facebook account, he noticed something concerning in his newsfeed. I remember like scrolling, you know, through a little bit. And I think one of the very first things I saw was that one of my friends, you know, was no longer in a relationship. And I was like, what?

That's not a thing I want to, like, have broadcasted. Par's friend was probably thinking, okay, this bit about my life will just be seen when my friends look up my profile. But the newsfeed changed that dynamic completely. It was like a megaphone, blasting private conversations, breakups, and inside jokes for everyone to dissect. Par was spooked. So I...

Got on. I made a Facebook group called Students Against Facebook News Feed. I think I used, like, Microsoft Paint or something to make, like,

pretty bad looking logo for it. And then he had to get some RA training. So he signed off for the morning. Then I got a call at like noon that day and it was from a friend. They were like, yo, Ben, have you checked Facebook? I'm like, no. It's like, you have 10,000 people in your Facebook group. Wait, what? It turns out that a lot of people felt like Ben Parr did.

And because she had written the announcement post, Ruchi Sanghwi was the face of this new controversial feature. Given how the internet is, of course, famous for respectful civic debate, Sanghwi heard from Facebook users pretty directly. Yes, there was a group that said Ruchi is the devil.

It's amazing how relaxed Zongwei sounds about this, because user protests were not just happening online. People showed up to the Facebook office.

It was the first time we actually got a security guard to stand outside the doors of the Facebook offices. And when we came into work and when we left work, we were asked to use the back entrance just as a safety precaution.

Over the next few days, Ben Parr said his group swelled to around 750,000 members. It was the largest group protesting News Feed, fortunately surpassing RuchiIsTheDevil. To put that number into perspective, in 2006, Facebook had a user base of just 7 or 8 million people. So Parr's group represented roughly 10% of everyone on the platform.

It got Facebook's attention. Internally, actually, there was a huge conflict. By the time we launched News Feed, we had hired a couple of executives. And there was a little bit of controversy within the company about whether or not we should turn off. I mean, we were calling News Feed back then a feature, whether or not we should turn off the new feature that we had launched. So Sangmi and her colleagues investigated the real impact of the News Feed.

Was it making people leave Facebook or use the platform any less? What we found really fascinating is that even though users were complaining about it and talking about how they hated it, they were actually spreading the word about how much they hated it through Facebook itself.

So they would start these Facebook groups. And for the first time ever, we had like a million users in the Facebook groups and they're propagating the message and that message was getting spread through newsfeed. The second thing that we noticed is that even though people hated it, they were spending twice as much time on the newsfeed than they had ever before on Facebook, which in essence is like one of those things like I love it, but I hate it.

The numbers didn't lie. Zuckerberg's vision was dead on. Newsfeed made people want to use Facebook even more. It proved a loaded point. Even when people complain about Facebook, they still use it. Songwe says it was Zuckerberg and co-founder Dustin Moskowitz who ultimately made the decision to keep Newsfeed up.

Zuckerberg took the long view, like he would do in other pivotal moments over the next 18 years. But for now, he still had to deal with those hundreds of thousands of upset users.

After the break, a young Zuckerberg tested by his first major public controversy. Support for Land of the Giants comes from Quince. The summer is not quite over yet, but shifting your wardrobe to the colder months could start now, little by little. You can update your closet without breaking the bank with Quince. They offer a variety of timeless, high-quality items. Quince has cashmere sweaters from $50, pants for every occasion, and washable silk tops.

And it's not just clothes. They have premium luggage options and high-quality bedding, too. Quince's luxury essentials are all priced 50% to 80% less than similar brands. I've checked out Quince for myself, picking up a hand-woven Italian leather clutch for my mom. As soon as she saw it, she commented on how soft and pretty the leather was and told me it was the perfect size for everything she needs to carry out on a quick shopping trip.

Make switching seasons a breeze with Quince's high-quality closet essentials. Go to quince.com slash giants for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash giants to get free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com slash giants

On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.

Michael Zimmer was not a college student in early September 2006, but the launch of the news feed still felt personal. I remember this day and this week very well. All of a sudden, you know, the way that information was flowing on this platform changed radically. Zimmer researches issues around online privacy and ethics. He also runs a project called the Zuckerberg Files, which catalogs every public comment the founder has ever made.

We asked Zimmer, as a scholar of the Zuckerberg canon, about the founder's most illuminating public comments. And he actually brought up a moment from the News Feed launch, when Zuckerberg wrote a post on Facebook in response to the user backlash. He calls this, it's three short sentences, calm down, breathe, we hear you.

Here are a couple other lines. Quote, And we agree. Stalking isn't cool. But being able to know what's going on in your friends' lives is.

I view this as kind of like Zuckerberg as engineer responding. It's like, I know a bunch of you are concerned. I know a bunch of you think this is crazy, but trust me, we're on top of it. We'll deal with it. Everything's going to be fine. But it wasn't just the tone of Zuckerberg's posts that irked Zimmer. He says, "We didn't take away any privacy options. Your privacy options remain the same. None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn't see it before these changes."

These are the statements he's making. But things have changed. That's the crazy thing. Exactly. I mean, it's like technically it's true, but things have fundamentally changed in the sense that you no longer had to visit my page to see if I was in a relationship or not and remember what my page said yesterday because of that.

difference that Delta was being fed to everyone, you know, on the site. And of course he knows that because that was the whole point of putting the newsfeed together. The whole point of the newsfeed was to knock down the walls separating all the information on Facebook. It was a structural change to the platform that let loose all this personal news we were used to keeping on our profiles, our little digital rooms.

How could Zuckerberg say nothing had changed? His note missed the feeling at the center of the backlash, that jarring, vulnerable sense of suddenly being on display. ♪

Yes, I mean, with like 20 plus years of experience and two kids. Yes, I could totally see why that would be condescending. But back then, I think we were just like, we were literally like, I don't know how to explain this. Like, you know, we weren't like thinking maliciously or we weren't thinking paternalistically. We were writing the way we speak.

I remember getting email from Mark about like, you know, what's like figure out like, how can I improve the product? And how can we like, you know, make it better for users? Wait, back up. So Mark personally emailed you. He emailed. It was right after he put out this note. By that point, Ben Parr, the creator of that big Facebook group, had become a sort of representative for user backlash. But it

But it was like really, you know, personal and really about like, how can we improve the product? I remember like feeling good. The CEO of a important company, even back then Facebook was very important, reaching out and not being like, I hate you. It was like,

I agree with you. How can we make it better? I'd like to hear from you. Keep in touch. The group Par started on Facebook had actually included some demands for the company. Like a way for users to control the information that the newsfeed shared. And to Zuckerberg's credit, that is exactly what Facebook quickly rolled out. We worked on building privacy controls that allowed users to say that, like, you know, even though I'm sharing this on my profile, I don't want this published to my friends' newsfeeds.

And that was something that we worked on and launched in two to three days, which was pretty epic and made all the difference to our users. Just days after the newsfeed launch, Zuckerberg published another Facebook post to announce these privacy tools. This one has a really different tone from that first post.

He opened with, quote, "We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed, we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them." The backlash eventually died down. People got used to the idea that by default, what you did on Facebook would be broadcast to all your friends through the News Feed. And sure, you could tweak your privacy settings.

But in the end, most people used the newsfeed the way Zuckerberg intended. Even Ben Parr, who later became a technology journalist. Newsfeed represented a fundamental shift for Facebook from directory place you like go once in a while to central nexus of your life. Like I do think that's kind of when the shift of Facebook, you know, becoming a quasi operating system for your personal life happened.

About three weeks after the launch of the news feed, Facebook reached another milestone. It extended past college campuses. By the end of September 2006, anyone over the age of 13 could be on Facebook.

I think it's not only really changed the way that people think about and use Facebook today, but in a lot of ways it's changed the whole industry. This is Zuckerberg a decade after the launch of the news feed. He'd gathered the company's earliest employees, including Ruchi Sanghwi, for a Facebook Live event to celebrate the anniversary.

Fast forward 10 years, it ended up being such a basic idea in terms of how people wanted to share and stay in touch with people on social products that now there are a lot of different social apps today. And basically every major social app has its own equivalent of newsfeed. And that came from the original work that this team did in proving that this was going to be a good thing.

There's an important idea here, an implicit assumption that what was good about the newsfeed was that it got people to share more.

Sharing was actually something Zuckerberg talked a lot about in the years right after the newsfeed launch. Here he is at the Web Summit conference in 2008. I would expect that, you know, next year people will share twice as much information as they are this year. And then the year after that, they'll share twice as much information as they are next year. And, you know, that just means that people are using Facebook and applications in the ecosystem more and more. It's a fundamental idea to Facebook. More sharing means more connections. And that's just going to be good for the world.

More than any other Zuckerberg invention, Newsfeed perfectly embodies that idea. For better and worse.

As Facebook grew over the following years, News Feed expanded, bringing in brands, media publications, heads of state, celebrities. It became how people shared and experienced not just their social lives, but their actual news, their politics. And now News Feed sits at the core of the company's biggest problems. Problems that are a regular part of the news cycle.

The bad guys are constantly looking for ways to fool Facebook's newsfeed algorithm, which learns in great detail what we like and then strives to give us more of the same. After an algorithm change in 2018, researchers warned that misinformation, toxicity, and violent content are inordinately prevalent. Cambridge Analytica worked for Senator Ted Cruz and then for Donald Trump. The idea was to put 2016 political advertising on steroids. I just don't see how the status quo

can go on. It is not hyperbolic to say that misinformation on Facebook kills people. Ruchi Sangwe left Facebook in 2010 to start her own company. It's been a long time since she's had to think about Facebook's problems. But we were still curious. Would she have done anything differently? Would you raise anything or just change anything in the way you approached it at all? I think that to anticipate all of these things would have virtually been impossible.

And in retrospect, had we been oracles and been able to predict all of these things, like it would have probably stopped us in our tracks in that like we wouldn't have known how to solve these kinds of problems back then. I think the issue is like, you know, technologists as a as a genre of people are just optimists at heart.

This moment really stuck with me after our interview. Because Sangvi's point was that to move forward, to build, Facebook almost had to be optimistic. This is something that came up a lot in our interviews for this series. It's the story of Facebook in a nutshell. This is a company that built for scale because it believed more sharing was de facto good. But there are consequences when you let basically anyone reach millions overnight. In hindsight, it seems obvious, right?

Over our coming episodes, we'll lay out what we do know about the complications of connecting at scale and go inside the big decisions that made Meta the giant it is today. On that note, in our second episode, the story of how a young Facebook built the playbook for exponential user growth.

Plus, Zuckerberg's attempt to own the social web leads his company into one of its most damaging scandals. The transfer of data externally, it didn't rattle me at first. I was assuming that people would kind of have some understanding of what happened when they clicked some of these things. It just turns out I'm not totally convinced they understood what they were choosing.

News clips in this episode were from PBS NewsHour, CNN Reality Check with Jon Avlon, CBS Evening News, and CBS Sunday Morning. Special thanks to Aditya Agarwal and Kate Lossie. Derek Francesi's 2005 interview with Mark Zuckerberg was for the film Now Entering a Millennial Generation. An extra special thanks to Walt Mossberg for sharing his insight into this era with us.

Land of the Giants, the Facebook meta disruption is a production of Recode, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Cunane is our senior producer. Production support for this episode from Cynthia Betubiza. Jolie Myers is our editor. Richard Seema is our fact checker. Brandon McFarland composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Samantha Oltman is Recode's editor-in-chief. Jake Castronakis is deputy editor at The Verge.

Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kerwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Heath. And I'm Shireen Khafari. If you like this show, please share it and follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app.