The following is from ivie-online on tumblr and explains some of the enshittification of the contemporary internet
– so between 2014-2016 facebook launches a massive ‘pivot to video’ campaign to draw media orgs to their video-based features. zuckerberg’s doing rounds, saying that in the near future, newsfeeds will mostly be video, and that video is the future of media. to back this up, they release tons of wild viewership metrics for ads on facebook, enticing advertisers to prioritize video, and as a result, the media that relies upon advertisers for funding began to do the same.
– this had an industry-wide impact, and media orgs, from established news, to humor websites, to smaller creators, fire writers and those primarily focused on print, and direct resources to their video creation efforts.
– around 2016, it’s revealed that facebook completely fabricated their original numbers, likely inflating them between 150-900%. additionally, their viewership metric considered 3 seconds of a person watching to be a ‘view’ (whereas youtube had a 30 second requirement for the same metric).
-Having totally restructured in order to pivot to facebook video, many media orgs were unable to recapture hard won (and sometimes decades old) audiences. College Humor, Funny or Die, MTV News, Vice, Mic, and Vox were among those that were seriously impacted.
– after a 2018 class action lawsuit, facebook (who maintain that the whole ordeal was caused by a simple error in calculation) was made to pay 40 million in damages, which 1, is a paltry sum when we consider the 22 billion they made in profit that same year, and 2, does nothing to bring back the jobs, audiences, and media orgs they destroyed. to make matters worse, many still posit that it was never the public, but rather advertisers that preferred video over text, meaning that facebook intentionally deceived everyone involved specifically to secure more advertising dollars. so yeah, fb is evil and… probably should be stopped
