Mark Zuckerberg once promised Facebook would move fast and break things. Now, Zuckerberg says Facebook is trying to fix the things it broke.
Standing on stage before an audience of developers at the annual F8 Conference on Tuesday, Zuckerberg—the same guy who spent years convincing billions of people to share their every thought and action with the world—explained all the ways Facebook is going to help people keep that same information under wraps.
“I believe the future is private,” Zuckerberg said, almost as soon as he began, setting the tone for a day of product announcements across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp.
In his much-anticipated keynote address, Zuckerberg readily admitted he’s an odd champion for the cause of privacy, particularly after the year Facebook has had. The social networking giant now faces more than a dozen international investigations into its history of privacy violations, from its years of willy-nilly data sharing to several recent data breaches.
“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” Zuckerberg said through nervous laughter. But he seems to believe a Facebook redesign and a litany of new products focused on messaging and groups could turn that reputation around. “At the end of the day, this isn’t just about building some new products,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s a major shift in how we run this company.”
To mark this supposedly new era, Zuckerberg unveiled a subtle redesign for Facebook, which places more emphasis on Groups. There’s now a Groups tab at the center of the app, content from Groups will appear more often in News Feed, and Facebook will give users more prompts to discover and join new Groups. Facebook is also adding new features for specific types of communities. Groups related to jobs, for instance, will now accept job postings from employers, while health support Groups will enable users to ask administrators to post on their behalf, in order to protect their privacy.
“Basically now, everywhere where you’re going to be able to see and connect with your friends, you’re also going to be able to see and connect with groups that you care about,” Zuckerberg said. “It all adds up to this feeling that groups are now at the heart of the experience, just as much as your friends and family are.”
Other announcements are tailor-made to get people out from behind their computer screens and meeting up in person. One such product, called Secret Crush, gives Facebook users a way to indicate which of their Facebook friends they’re romantically interested in and get notified if the feeling is mutual. Facebook has also revamped its Events tab to make it easier to find nearby events.
These announcements are, in many ways, a continuation of a multi-year shift underway at Facebook. For more than two years, the company’s leaders have expressed a desire to reorient Facebook around smaller communities. Zuckerberg first indicated this switch back in 2017, when he published a 5,000-world manifesto on making Facebook a platform for enabling real world connections. It was a departure from the social network’s long-stated vision of connecting everyone in the world to the most possible people. The flaws in that vision became starkly apparent around 2016, when propagandists and bad actors abused so many thin, anonymous connections to manipulate and divide people for political gain.
Since then, many of the public-facing changes Facebook has made seem designed to deliver on this new, more personal vision of connection—though not always successfully. In early 2018, the company announced it was tweaking its News Feed algorithm to prioritize what Facebook called “meaningful social interactions,” a decision that ended up torpedoing traffic to news publishers that had depended on Facebook for years. A year later, driven by endless privacy scandals, Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be shifting even further toward privacy. If Facebook of the last 15 years has been the equivalent of the digital town square, Zuckerberg has repeatedly explained, it’s now working on building the digital living room.
But Tuesday’s announcements were scant on details about some of the biggest changes coming to Facebook, including the company’s plan to launch an encrypted messaging platform that works across Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, its three messaging apps. Such a platform would protect private conversations for billions of people around the world, Zuckerberg explained on stage, but it would also potentially provide safe haven for criminals and people who want to spread hate without consequences. Still, the CEO framed Facebook’s relatively measured approach to introducing this platform as evidence itself of how far the company has come.
“A few years ago, we probably would have just rolled this out and then tried to adjust and address issues as they came up,” Zuckerberg said. “Now we’re going out and consulting with experts and trying to make sure that we get this balance right.”
In a lot of ways, the company Zuckerberg described on Tuesday was markedly different from the one he’s spent the last decade and a half building. The Facebook News Feed, for instance, long the focal point of the platform—and the source of so many of Facebook’s problems with misinformation and fake news—was hardly discussed.
But in other ways, Facebook’s constant drive to insinuate itself into ever more aspects of people’s lives remains unchanged. On WhatsApp, for instance, Facebook is testing out a payment product with a million users in India, which it hopes to expand to other countries this year. On Instagram, it’s launched a shopping channel and a way for people to buy products directly from influencers. Despite Zuckerberg’s best efforts to cram these products under the privacy umbrella, it’s hard to see how they’re anything more than opportunities for Facebook to learn more about its users—and to make more money from that information.
Which is, after all, the point. Facebook’s business depends on advertisers targeting billions of people based on the deeply personal details that Facebook has collected on them. As the company’s recent earnings report showed, that business is only growing. The question underlying Zuckerberg’s privacy push is whether Facebook’s “major shifts” will ever amount to much more than a fresh coat of paint on a building with rot in its foundation.