Tim Wu

They promised everybody, you know, come get this huge scale.

We're giving you all this traffic.

You can build a business here.

There was no business to build there at any significant scale.

And two, it turned out that the video view counts were fraudulent.

And so a huge amount of the news industry, among other things, pivoted to video.

and it was based on lies.

And there was a recent Reuters report that Facebook was actually charging advertisers more for these things that they knew were scams.

So I am really not here to defend Facebook as an actor.

But one of the crazy things amidst all of this, a thing you really focused on there was moving from showing us what we had asked to see to showing us what I would say Facebook wants us to see.

There was just the FTC versus Meta case.

Tim was, of course, involved in that.

And one of the statistics that came out during it is that only 7% of time spent on Instagram is spent on things people you follow are showing you.

Similarly, on Facebook itself, it's under 20%.

I forget the exact number, but it's very low.

They have moved under competition from TikTok specifically, although not only, to these AI-driven algorithmic feeds showing you not what you have asked to see, but what they find will keep you there.

And what they are finding is that it will, in fact, keep you there and people are coming back to it and they spend more time on Instagram when you turn the feed into this algorithmic feed.

This is the whole reveal preference thing that you were talking about earlier.

My personal experience of Instagram when I go on it now is one reason I try to go on it less is that I can actually feel how much more compelling it is.

I like it less, but the feeling of getting pulled into something is much stronger.