Meta found when it tested a new system to customize how many ads it shows based on how much a user likes or dislikes them, users didn’t seem to know the difference. The time they spent on the platforms and engaged on it didn’t change much. “This change had a minimal impact on people’s experience and was not very noticeable,” Hegeman says.
Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee wrote letters (PDF) to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, FBI director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, White House chief of staff Suzy Wiles, and White House chief counsel David Warrington (PDF) asking for documents detailing Musk’s government contracts, security clearances, and relationships with foreign governments and entities.
The committee is investigating Musk’s conflicts of interest, which legislators write are particularly egregious given his “extensive ties” to China, Russia, and other foreign governments.
The FTC is asking Meta about Apple’s 2021 App Tracking Transparency policy that let users decide whether to let developers track their activity off-app to help serve more persoanlized ads. Meta warned investors in 2022 that it would result in a $10 billion revenue hit to its business that year. That’s presumably because when users are given an option to give Facebook and Instagram less data, at least a significant chunk of them take it. We don’t know exactly how many, though, since the judge sealed the courtroom to discuss internal metrics like how many people opted into the tracking.
That’s theme of the FTC’s questioning of Meta’s CRO. The FTC’s Stephen Pearson is asking about what Meta says it collects in its privacy policy, and points out that if Instagram were independent, it would have its own policy. Meta uses this data to fuel personalized advertising, which makes money for the company. Pearson is also beginning to touch on ad load — or the relative amount of ads to organic posts users see in their feed — which the FTC has tried to show Meta can increase with relatively little risk of losing users.
John Hegeman, the top executive in charge of monetizing Facebook and Instagram, just took the stand. He previously led product management for the Facebook feed.
What users say they want and what they show they want through their actions can be two different things. Cobb illustrates this point with the example of chronological feeds. While users repeatedly report this as a feature they’d like, Cobb says every time the company has tested it, satisfaction with the app declines and users’ engagement changes.
But that dip soon recovered, Cobb testifies. He’s referencing the sweeping content moderation and fact-checking policy changes CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January just ahead of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, which answered a Republican wish-list.
CBS News and Politico are reporting that both National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and his deputy, Alex Wong, will leave their posts in the Trump White House. Waltz has confirmed he created the “Houthi PC Small Group” chat on Signal in March and invited The Atlantic EIC Jeffrey Goldberg, who later reported on his inadvertent access to key information about active military operations in Yemen.
Fox News reports that both Waltz and Wong “were purged” on Thursday following last month’s leak.
Dips in how users feel about Meta’s brand are often correlated to media coverage — not necessarily actual changes to the product, Meta research executive Curtiss Cobb testifies on cross-examination. The FTC had tried to frame the fact that users don’t leave the apps in droves after reporting feeling worse about Meta’s brand shows they’re locked in due to Meta’s alleged monopoly. Meta is trying to complicate this picture, by showing that just because users feel worse about the brand after a specific media event doesn’t mean that its products are getting any worse — and that might be reason enough to stay.