The Great Unraveling: The Upsides—and Downsides—of Network Effects (Part 2)

Social Media's Second 'Pivot to Video' Subjugates 'Time Well Spent' to 'Watch Time'

On January 11, 2018, Facebook (now Meta) Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted about a major shift in strategy for the social media giant [emphasis mine].

One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent.

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The research shows that when we use social media to connect with people we care about, it can be good for our well-being. We can feel more connected and less lonely, and that correlates with long term measures of happiness and health. On the other hand, passively reading articles or watching videos -- even if they're entertaining or informative -- may not be as good.

Based on this, we're making a major change to how we build Facebook. I'm changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions.

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Now, I want to be clear: by making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down. But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.

This strategy shift, taken at face value, was a constructive step that rightfully highlighted the tension between entertaining content and meaningful social interaction. It acknowledged that the News Feed’s prioritization of content adept at co-opting short-term attention spans over connections between people had eroded the foundation of the social network. The context of this decision—public backlash over the proliferation of “fake news” in the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential Election—gave Facebook further rationale to deprioritize news and other content designed to go viral.

A more cynical view of the policy change is that it provided Facebook with air cover in case its engagement declines become more apparent and noticeable. The News Feed updates therefore aimed to fortify the bonds of the social network with the understanding that if the network effects began to unravel, then engagement would eventually decline along with it. Ultimately, however, “time well spent” would still need to translate into “time spent” for the long-term health of Facebook’s ad business.

More than five years later, that issue is once again rearing its head for Facebook and its social media counterpart, Twitter (X).

In Part 1 of this article, I analyzed how recent declines in key engagement metrics—specifically, Daily Active Users (DAUs) and Sessions—at Facebook and Twitter suggest the two social media platforms’ network effects are unraveling. In Part 2, I’ll explore what that means and its downstream implications on media consumption.