News websites have pushed video in various forms, as it generally has higher ad revenue, but people often skip right over it for the text.
A perk of text is you can glance through it extremely quickly, to see if there is anything interesting.
That being said, this was a bug in the code. All of us write bugs, and so we should maybe not be as harsh to other people who do. Was it a convenient bug? Yes it was, it helped push a narrative around video and provided more videos for people on FB. Was that intentional? Almost certainly not, although they should've fixed it much, much quicker.
That's a knew or should have know territory - they were pushing a new feature, they lied about the impact of the new feature, they changed the industry around it and wasted billions of dollars. Later this was called "a bug" - seems beyond convenient for facebook when you know, double checking that type of thing is usually a big deal for advertisers.
Source: I was there, and tangentially involved in this
When my company made a mistake that cost our customers 750k, we fell on our sword and recouped them the cost.
We had 11k users at the time :)
I meant in terms of employees. About 4.5k in my recall, for running FB, IG and Whatsapp, as well as all of the ads products.
As other have said, they've lost court cases over it.
I'm a dev, I ship bugs all the time. When I discover one, I fix it asap, apologise to everyone, make amends if I can. Zuck did none of that.
Perhaps I'm missing some important aspect, but what would be the benefit of lying about this? How would serving video that didn't promote engagement help FB at all? Just more storage and bandwidth without increased opportunity to serve an ad -- backwards from how I understand FB's model.
People do say something false for a believed gain all the time. But usually when I hear something false it's a misunderstanding or misspeaking. So based on my (relatively naïve) model of how FB works as a business, "lying" doesn't seem like the right word here.
these specific metrics were used to indicate to business accounts what kind of content was appreciated, and cited in executive keynotes, essentially demanding an internet-wide "pivot to video".
one lawsuit has already settled with a payout and it seems like a second one is ongoing.
i believe the intent was that video embeds are watched in the feed, whereas articles are more often links out.
it was incredibly destructive as nearly every news outfit cited this as the motivation for gutting their investigations and writing staff.
https://www.ft.com/content/6fc9fda0-f801-4a56-b007-430ceaedc...
https://www.ft.com/content/c144b3e0-a502-440b-8565-53a4ce547...
Facebook gets paid for showing ads and videos were playing automatically on hover. It looks like more engagement but the call to actions is lower (no one clicks on a link).
The strategy probably worked better on instagram.