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Why Facebook’s Responsible A.I. Team Needs to Be Able to Lose Money in Order to Do Its Job
‘Oh, your algorithm update lowers revenue and decreases usage? Ship it!’
“Measure what matters and what you measure matters.” There are any number of similar quotations that talk about how the very act of tracking a KPI in an organization causes people to focus on it more, let alone if you’re linking an explicit incentive structure to goals. It’s why, for example, if boards care about ideals like diversity and culture, they should work with CEOs to make sure those stats are first-class citizens on the company dashboards alongside revenue and profit.
It’s even harder when you can’t agree what the right metric should be. As I’ve written before, one of the problems we face as an industry is largely trying to measure current day Web 3.0 with Web 2.0 dashboards. Misinformation, trolling, harassment, polarization, and the resulting negative implications — none of these are as simple to define as CTR or CPM. I myself fell victim to this during my time leading the consumer product team at YouTube. When Google leadership asked us to shift from focusing solely on user growth to also increasing monetization, the team we destaffed to fund the new effort had been working on the comments system. Yup, YouTube comments, which most often resulted in a lot of name-calling, profanity, and worse. We all wanted it to improve, but why did I sacrifice this project in the near term? Because it wasn’t connected to a first-tier KPI, like revenue, uploads, or playbacks. So it had to wait.
But what if you have the right metric to measure—say, the negative externalities of a product—but it turns out that number is loosely negatively correlated with your business KPIs? Like, for example, if polarizing content leads to more short-term engagement, which leads to more active users, which leads to more ad revenue? It’s not crazy to wonder this, and while I don’t believe that it’s a true correlation or that our social platforms are intentionally running at the efficient frontier of anger and profits, I do always wonder what margin pressure does to, say, adequate investment in trust and safety.
Casey Newton’s Platformer article about Facebook’s Responsible A.I. team provoked a…
