On Monday, I had the chance to talk to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the company’s plans to build new audio products in the next few months. The occasion of our interview was the opening of Sidechannel, a Discord server that we launched over the weekend with some independent journalists. We didn’t know what to expect when we opened the doors, but over 2,500 people showed up on the first day and many of them joined in for a lively conversation about Facebook’s rapidly evolving attitudes toward creators.
If you missed the conversation, you can find audio here on Soundcloud. (Go to 1:10 to pass on my welcome message to Sidechannel members.) There is also a very harsh automatic transcript on Otter if you like your moderately corrupted conversations of machine learning errors.
Zuckerberg said: There are at least three big audio bets that Facebook will set in the next three to six months.
- “Soundbites” is a new format for creative, short-form sound that will appear in the company’s product suite. Think TikTok, but for audio; Soundbites will allow you to change your sound through filters and other effects.
- Facebook will also become a home for long-form audio, recommending shows and episodes based on your interests and allowing you to consume them in the app. An extended partnership with Spotify will bring the company’s audio player to the Facebook app, allowing users to listen to both music and podcasts.
- Facebook will add live Clubhouse-style audio cameras, which are expected to be popular with groups. Participants will be able to tilt the creators with Facebook’s digital currency, Stars.
This is an unusually detailed roadmap for future Facebook products – Vox reported on some of them yesterday – and is probably best rated when these features are actually delivered. In the meantime, though, here are five great things that stood out to me from my conversation with Zuckerberg.
Facebook is betting on small businesses on big ones
The idea of an “audio pivot” refers to the video pivot, a phenomenon in the mid-2010s in which Facebook paid large publishers to create short videos for News Feed. Within a few years, Facebook began to reduce the distribution of video editors in the feed, but led to hundreds of layoffs in the media industry. (The company also revealed that it accidentally inflated audience values during this period.)
At the same time, the video was successful on Facebook – it tended to be a user-generated video, which created a context for profitable video ads to be placed next to them. The Facebook video pivot worked great for Facebook; publishers have suffered.
And the company’s audio investments could follow a similar path. The flashing red light I’d be looking for: news that Facebook is making advance payments to CNN, New York Times, or other common suspects to create a short or long sound for the platform.
But to hear Zuckerberg tell him on Monday, audio playback means a lot more about helping the little one. Here’s what he said when I asked if the sound of Facebook is more likely to benefit individual creators than large publishers:
“A large part of the creative economy is that it allows individuals to shift power from some traditional institutions to individuals to exercise their own creativity. And I think this is a positive trend in the world. It is really empowering for many people and allows the creation of many new things. I think, based on that, your prediction that this will work better, maybe for individual creators or small groups – I could see that the game is safe. “
How to moderate live sound is still an open question
Facebook is getting better at moderating text and video content, especially in the United States. But as a recent series in guardian illustrated, the weaker the implementation of policies, the further away the content is from Menlo Park.
I asked Zuckerberg how he intends to launch audio products in good and fair moderation. He told me that the company will be able to learn many lessons from what it has learned about monitoring text and video posts for bad behavior.
But he also acknowledged that there is still a debate about the degree to which audio – especially live audio – should be moderate. If I walk by your picnic table in the park and hear you sharing misinformation with your friends, I won’t call the police. If the same conversation took place on the audio rooms on Facebook, should moderators shut it down? Hide it from recommendations? Or leave her alone?
The jury is still out, Zuckerberg said.
“There is also this question against what you should impose. This will be an open debate. If we go back five years, I think a lot more people have been more about freedom of expression. Today, there are still a lot of people, but there is also this growing wave of more people who are basically asking for blocking or limiting several things in a way.
“This set of debates, I think, will continue forever, as to where to find the right line. … I don’t mean that just because you have the ability to do different types of execution, that you should always do everything. I think a lot of times you want to be on the side of free speech and allow people to have more conversations. ”
Facebook believes that creators should have more ownership over their audience
When I wrote about Facebook’s interest in newsletters last month, I noticed that an open question was whether writers would be able to keep their email lists if they decided to leave the platform. On Monday, Zuckerberg confirmed they could.
“I think one of the strong things Substack has done is to make it so that … if someone signs up with them, [and] decide to pick it up and go somewhere else, your subscriber list is yours. And I think that’s a really strong part of the creative economy, too. ”
He continued: “When we talk about granting favorable conditions [to creators], it’s not really just the economy. I think it’s also portability, so that creators know that if they start building a business here, they won’t just be locked up and be able to take it to different places. ”
This is a pretty big deal! You cannot export subscribers to your Facebook page or your Instagram followers. You can’t even easily transfer your subscribers to TikTok or YouTube. If Facebook is based on the notion that creators should have a relationship with their subscribers, it could be the beginning of a healthy change of mentality between platforms.
Margin Substack is Facebook’s opportunity
One of the reasons some people are scammers in Substack is that the company takes 10% of writers’ revenue, which is more than it would cost writers to build their own sites on WordPress or elsewhere. (See my ethical disclosure about Substack.) For many, and even most, writers on the platform, this 10% percentage might not affect much, even when combined with payment processing fees, which are usually around 3%. But once you earn over $ 100,000 on the platform, the fees could start to pay off.
Zuckerberg wouldn’t tell me what, if anything, Facebook intends to charge newsletter writers for using the platform. But it looks like it will be much less than 10%:
“Most of our business will not be to take a small piece of the tools of the creators. So this gives us the opportunity to build tools on potentially more favorable terms and to put more of the economy in favor of creators.
“If you think about our interests in space, we want this type of creativity to thrive. We want that content to be out there and created. We believe that this helps to stimulate social connections, helps to build community, helps people to give things they can talk about and share. And that is ultimately the bread and butter of what we do. ”
There is a shift in power from institutions to individuals
Zuckerberg claims that some of the negative attitudes about Facebook are explained by the same forces that drive the success of creators. It is a story that has so far been told with the greatest power by the people who lose that equation, he told me:
“I think if you look at the big bow here, what really happens is that individuals get more power and more opportunities. To create the lives and jobs they want, to connect with the people they want to connect with, the ideas they want, to share the ideas they want.
“And I think that will lead to a better world. It will be different from the world we had before – I think it will be more diverse. I think there may be more different ideas and models. And I think it inevitably means that some of the people who have had control of that world in the past will lose [control].
“I can see why those people will mourn the direction they are going. But my concern is that we too often say the negative parts of it, from the perspective of institutions that may not be on the winning side of these changes. . I think the people who are on the winning side of these changes are individuals.
“I’ve learned in recent years not to be too pollyanna-ish about it. There are real issues that need to be addressed. But my own sense is that the narrative is a little too biased or maybe a lot too biased to say the negative side of the issues, rather than all the value and opportunity that is created. And that’s what I care about. ”
There is a lot to think about here, for me and for all of us.
This column was co-published with Platformer, a daily newsletter on Big Tech and Democracy.