Citizen Zuckerberg

Another interesting piece speculating Zuckerberg as a 2020 presidential candidate. Trump election has done one thing for sure – Anyone is game for becoming the POTUS. 4 years of campaign is more than enough. But, how will it be like to have the CEO as the POTUS.

Lest this sound like hyperbolic alarmism, consider how far CEOs have already come. For the CEO of Exxon Mobil to become Secretary of State was once unthinkable. Not anymore. And let’s be honest: being the CEO of Exxon Mobil gives one superb experience at negotiating U.S. interests (at least the Realpolitik ones) with foreign governments. Being CEO at a top investment bank, hedge fund, or private equity firm is now the primary pipeline to become treasury secretary. Is this perhaps because the two jobs are rather similar? As much as commerce secretary, the modern cabinet position reliably staffed by a CEO, is a joke, it has come to the point where every White House cabinet position, even the presidency itself, is directly staffable by a CEO. Let the cabinet and the presidency itself be filled by commerce secretaries; after all, the business of America is business.

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David V. Johnson — The Baffler

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Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug?

Has Facebook reached its peak with 2 billion people using it every month? If it has then there is only one way to go if Facebook does not deal with its problems and reinvent itself. Clickbaits, fake news, violent and suicide videos are being spread through Facebook’s news feed. How is Facebook trying to solve these issues?

If a human editor ran News Feed, she would look at the clickbait scourge and make simple, intuitive fixes: Turn down the Upworthy knob. But Facebook approaches the feed as an engineering project rather than an editorial one. When it makes alterations in the code that powers News Feed, it’s often only because it has found some clear signal in its data that users are demanding the change. In this sense, clickbait was a riddle. In surveys, people kept telling Facebook that they hated teasing headlines. But if that was true, why were they clicking on them? Was there something Facebook’s algorithm was missing, some signal that would show that despite the clicks, clickbait was really sickening users?

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Farhad Manjoo — The New York Times

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What’s the Value of a Like?

Like is everywhere. It has become a tool of validation. This needull explores the value of a like. Does it really transform to more business?

But that study and others like it contain a fatal logical flaw: They confuse cause and consequence. It’s possible that getting people to follow a brand on social media makes them buy more. But it’s also possible that those who already have positive feelings toward a brand are more likely to follow it in the first place, and that’s why they spend more than nonfollowers. In 23 experiments conducted over the past four years and involving more than 18,000 people, we used an A/B testing method to explore a crucial counterfactual: what followers would have done had they not followed a brand. Given the millions of dollars in marketing budgets that flow to social media at many companies, the distinction is not trivial. It has enormous implications for marketers’ resource allocations and for how they manage their brands’ social media presence.

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Leslie K. John, Daniel Mochon, Oliver Emrich, Janet Schwartz — Harvard Business Review

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How Facebook makes money for me — and why that worries me

I have not been on Facebook since last 3 years. Sometimes, I do think if I am cutting myself off from lot of stuff that is happening out there and might be helpful to me. In today’s needull, Josh Bernoff gives a fairly detailed breakup of how he earns money. He discusses how Facebook is becoming increasingly important and why is he worried.

After Google, it became a lot easier to find things. As a result, everyone with something to say or share put it on the Web. Google transformed our experience, because it determined so much of what we see and read. Google attempted to be evenhanded about what it was doing, using what were supposed to be unbiased algorithms, and it did not change the underlying content it linked to.

Now Facebook increasingly determines what we see. It has added key improvements to the experience: connections with people we know about, a great mobile app, and crucially, an algorithm that shapes our perceptions. But unlike Google, Facebook is not attempting to be evenhanded. It shows you what it thinks you want to see, whether or not that’s what you ought to see — and regardless of whether what you read is true.

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Josh Bernoff — Without Bullshit

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This Team Runs Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Page

With Donald Trump becoming the President of the US, possibilities have opened for many other super rich public figures. Mark Zuckerberg apparently has set his sights on the presidency. Today’s needull discusses how Zuckerberg’s image is carefully controlled.

While plenty of chief executive officers have image managers, the scale of this team is something different. So is its conflation of Zuckerberg’s personal image with that of his company, the diaper-changing photos next to the user growth stats. “I don’t know that there are a lot of other business leaders that would find the same level of comfort sharing their personal and business stuff in the way that he does,” says Fred Cook, director of the University of Southern California Center for Public Relations, who has worked with Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs.

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Sarah Frier — Bloomberg

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I can’t just stand by and watch Mark Zuckerberg destroy the internet.

 

Fake news on Facebook is being discussed on various forums as one of the big issues facing internet today. This needull fears Mark Zuckerberg could destroy the internet.

But as Facebook races toward becoming the largest corporation ever, Zuckerberg’s plans for it may change.

Even though he has pledged to give away 99% of his Facebook stock during the course of his life, he will retain control of its board. And his power comes not from his billions of dollars, but from his access to our attention and our data.

His role in shaping humanity is so substantial that there’s even a team of university professors who log and analyze literally everything Zuckerberg says, in the hope of understanding his motivations and future plans.

For the rest of his life, Zuckerberg will be able to bring Facebook’s incredible power to bear in achieving whatever ends he desires.

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Quincy Larson — Free Code Camp

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The inside story of Facebook’s biggest setback

Well, as the title of the needull suggests, this is the inside story about Facebook’s attempt to launch Free Basics in India.

Many of Facebook’s supporters – in India and abroad – were aghast: why would a poor country reject the assistance of one of the world’s biggest and most powerful tech companies? Marc Andreessen, the powerful venture capitalist who sits on Facebook’s board, contemptuously suggested a misguided resentment of the west was to blame. “Anti-colonialism has been economically catastrophic for India for decades,” he told his 500,000 Twitter followers. “Why stop now?”

When I mentioned this quote to the Facebook executive, he raised his voice in frustration. “There’s no respect, and you can see that from Marc Andreessen. They wouldn’t dare to say that about China. In India they’re fine because we’ve been bending over backwards to accommodate them. I’m a supporter of prime minister Modi, but I don’t know why he has let this go on.” He bet me that Andreessen would apologise by the end of the next day. As we spoke, Andreessen tweeted an apology.

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The Guardian — Rahul Bhatia