Every summer, I get the chance to spend a lot of time in Montana. My wife is from there and has a huge extended family that all gets together every 4th of July in a small mountain town called Red Lodge in the Beartooth Mountains. In addition to the reunion, my wife and I always add a bunch of additional travel, hiking & other adventures for our kids and we end up spending as much of the summer there as we possibly can. It’s one of the highlights of the year and if it goes really well, it also means I’m usually offline for as much of it as possible.
All that is to say that I haven’t gotten a chance to write recently but I’m back in the real world now and wanted to jump in with a slightly different post than normal. Instead of a deep dive into a single topic, I thought I’d catch up on a bunch of news with some short thoughts on each. Here goes!
Burying the lede
A few weeks ago, Meta announced a handful of new transparency initiatives around AI but buried in the announcement was actually some incredibly important news about the future of their data sharing plans, namely something called the Content Library. There is a lot we still don’t know about the Library but it has the potential to be a big deal, so I thought I’d share a few quick thoughts:
Despite Nick’s confidence that it’s much better than CrowdTangle, the power of a tool like this isn’t how much data it has…it’s how useable it is, how well is the data structured, how reliable it is, how effectively does it keep up with platform changes and more. More data has the *potential* to lead to more clarity and power but not in of itself.
In addition to what it's like to actually use, the other really important question is *who* they are going to offer it to and whether that will include journalists at all. I’ve long argued, and will continue to argue, that a functional fourth estate needs some ability to understand and respond to what the public is talking about and if any platform is a home to any meaningful about of public civic discourse, they should find ways to make that available to journalists to easily see and monitor.
If it does end up being a better version of CrowdTangle and made available to the right audiences, that would be amazing and a huge deal and I'll be the loudest voice celebrating it.
Fun inside story...we actually had plans to rebrand CrowdTangle in 2021 and "Content Library" was one of the final options we were looking at before things fell apart. And in a mildly over-the-top proposal that I never actually got in front of leadership, that was just the first part of the vision. I imagined CrowdTangle as a small part of a larger public social “Library” that housed all of Facebook’s shareable data. The Library would not only have CrowdTangle, aka the Content Library, but also the Ad Library. It would also have a bunch of “Archives” around topics like human rights violations, influence operations & more that you needed special permission to access. We would rebrand all the relevant partnerships teams to a kind of “librarian” whose job was to help curate & manage access to the data. We would host events & gatherings, build community, and more. And of course, we might even have an actual physical location :).
Of course, the Content Library sounds like exactly where we always wanted to go with CrowdTangle and what we were pitching to leadership in our final months. That’s why this part of the story is ultimately a story about the power of regulation. I think the reality is that they wouldn't have built this, or continued to keep CrowdTangle around (which it still is), were it not for the regulatory requirements that have been put into the Code of Practice on Disinformation and even more, Article 40.12 of the Digital Services Act. More on this in the future.
Two prominent journalists make the case
When it comes to European policy, the reporter I follow the most is Mark Scott at Politico, and not surprisingly, I completely agree with his plan to fix social media. Another reporter I read regularly is Julia Angwin (no surprise) and needless to say, I agree wholeheartedly with this op-ed she wrote as well.
One of my new favorite things in the world of social media
The Neely Ethics & Technology Indices are one of my favorite new things when it comes to social media. Kudos to everyone involved in helping build this.
Threads
I’m not an expert in building or marketing consumer apps at all but a few random thoughts about Threads:
I think it was Casey Newton who once made the observation that in a lot of ways, Meta's core competency as a business is its content moderation. If that's true, then there's a mildly depressing world in which Meta is positioned incredibly well to dominate the fediverse (see BlueSky and Mastodon's content moderation issues of late). What if the fediverse actually just locks in the biggest players?
If the internet has taught anything, it's that moderating comment sections is a huge pain in the ass. I'm very unsure that the IG universe of creators is really going to be interested in the work that is required to actually manage a community. On the other hand, if it's just a place for creators to talk to *each other*, that makes a lot more sense to me but I still think it's a medium way more geared towards breaking news & politics than any other vertical.
Speaking of which, in April of last year, Jonathan Haidt wrote what became of the one most widely read essays of the year in the Atlantic where he lays a lot of the blame for social media's toxicity on the "Retweet" button. Meanwhile, Threads is basically an entire product built off of the retweet and Meta is specifically talking about the fact that they want it to be a fun space. That's a very big disconnect.
I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which a significant part of the emotional salience of using Threads is the fact that simply aren't any ads in it. I think it's exactly the same dynamic that made doing searches in ChatGPT so enjoyable.
AI and social media
There's a lot of talk about the explosion of generative AI and the impact it will have on social media, including misinformation. I can't help but that in a world of infinite content, it seems like the gatekeepers are going to be more important than ever.
Transparency and the NBA
I thought this was a great piece and also a fun example of how transparency & public scrutiny (however painful I'm sure it was) can lead to better institutions.
How to host a family reunion
One of my favorite jobs as CEO of CrowdTangle was organizing our off-sites. As a remote-first team, they were incredibly important to our ability to function and one of my indulgent CEO hobbies was going deep on how to make sure we got them right, including reading incessantly about different approaches to retreats, talking to other founders about how they did theirs, and more.
And this summer, I got to keep up that hobby but this time, doing it for a huge family reunion. It was an absolute blast and if anyone wants any tips or lessons learned, happy to share!
Love the family reunion chart. Hope to adapt it for something soon!