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Russia’s alleged manipulation of Facebook users will harm the company. On February 16th special counsel Robert Mueller filed conspiracy and fraud charges against 13 Russians for interfering in America’s 2016 election; Facebook was mentioned no fewer than 35 times as a place where Russian trolls swayed Americans through targeted political advertising and curated posts.
The indictment is also evidence that Facebook was not transparent in reporting the extent of activities that occurred on its platform. Last autumn it said it had determined Russian content reached around 130m Americans, and that Russian trolls had spent a mere $100,000 on ads during the 2016 election. Those figures seem too low. The Russian troll farm described in Mr Mueller’s indictment probably had an annual budget of around $70m and would have spent heavily on Facebook ads and content. American politicians may press the social-media firm for more information and also haul executives before Congress again to give testimony, especially as concerns mount about foreign interference in upcoming elections in 2018 and 2020—big distractions for a firm contending with several other significant challenges.
Controversies around Russian meddling, fake news and hateful speech on social media have not yet dented Facebook’s advertising revenues. But it seems likely that shrill and angry posts on the site, and bad press about social media, are playing a part in chilling usage of the core Facebook platform. Mr Zuckerberg’s approach to fixing it has been to tweak what posts users see, prioritising “meaningful interaction” over “meaningful content”, which has resulted in people seeing more of their friends’ updates and fewer news stories. But that does not go nearly far enough, says John Battelle of NewCo, a digital publisher.
Last month when Facebook reported earnings, it announced a decline in daily active users in America and Canada for the first time and estimated that, globally, users were spending around 50m fewer hours per day on Facebook. Such a drop translates into users worldwide spending around 15% less time on Facebook year over year, reckons Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research Group, an equity-research firm.
