Critics call Facebook’s fixes insufficient

Users already pulling back

NEW YORK — To Mark Zuckerberg, fixing Facebook means many things — protecting users from abuse, preventing elections meddling from malicious actors, weeding out fake news and “making sure time spent on Facebook is well spent.”

To critics, it’s all that and then some. But many of the steps Facebook has taken so far strike them as insufficient, and in some cases aimed as much at keeping people glued to the service.

Zuckerberg, who publicly sets himself a “personal challenge” every year, is this year focused on “fixing Facebook.”

But fixing Facebook, critics say, should also involve making it less addictive and its business model less dependent on as many people logging in as often and for as long as possible.

The company has already announced a slew of new “fixes.” Earlier this month, for instance, Facebook said that it would show users more posts from friends and family that it deems “meaningful,” while deemphasizing posts from publishers and businesses. The move did not affect paid advertising on the site.

Much of that, said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson, is about “making Facebook a happier place for users.” Even though Facebook warned that its changes might result in people spending less time with it, she suspects the company really hopes users will stick around longer.

There are signs that users — for whatever reason — may be pulling back. According to comScore, Facebook visitor spent an average of 910 minutes on the platform in December 2017. That’s down from 974 minutes in December 2016 and from 1,050 minutes in the same month in 2015.

At least some of this pullback might be by design, and it might be temporary. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said the company’s work to encourage “meaningful connections” has already reduced total time spent on Facebook by “roughly 50 million hours every day.” Divided across Facebook’s 1.4 billion daily active users, that’s about two minutes a day.

He added that the changes will make Facebook’s community — and business — “stronger over the long term.”

In the fourth quarter, the company said net income rose 20 percent on revenue that jumped 47 percent to $13 billion.

Facebook’s other recent fixes amount to somewhat murky efforts to boost the visibility of “trusted” news sources.

Such changes are “not meaningful,” Marc Rotenberg, president of the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center and longtime Facebook critic, said in an email. “Mark Zuckerberg will not solve the problems of Facebook by changing a few settings.”

Rotenberg would prefer Facebook to give users more control how their data is collected and to back efforts in Congress aimed at preventing foreign governments from influencing U.S. elections.

Facebook has said it will require disclosure on political ads — but it’s been silent about proposed legislation that would require it to do so.