Facebook has increasingly been reckoning with the many problems its network has, and today, the company released an ad acknowledging the issues and promising to get back to “what made Facebook good in the first place.” The ad will run on TV and in movie theaters through July, starting this afternoon, with some appearing during NBA playoff games.
The minute-long spot starts with a look back at Facebook’s older interface and tries to humanize what we do on the network by connecting posts back to real people, all with sad piano music playing overtop.
When it gets to addressing Facebook’s problems, the company isn’t quite as blunt as it could be. It says that “something happened” — as though it were an unexplained phenomenon, and not the result of Facebook’s own algorithms — and that the company “had to deal with spam, clickbait, fake news, and data misuse.”
It concludes by saying, “That’s going to change. From now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy.” The company says it’ll get back to putting the focus on your friends, presumably instead of political propaganda or even actual news.
Facebook has been trying to be, or at least appear to be, more open about what’s happening on its network over the past year, and particularly the last month or so. It started a blog post series last year called “Hard Questions” where it lays out some of its thinking behind how its rules are applied. And since the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s been publishing updates on the changes it’s making in response.
More than anything, this ad shows how much Facebook has begun to recognize that it doesn’t simply have issues that pop up here and there, it has a real image problem — that its own users don’t trust it and feel it’s gotten away from the service’s original purpose. This ad doesn’t change anything, but it’s at least saying some of the right things.
This isn’t the only ad that Facebook is running. It’s also running ads in cities saying things like “fake news is not your friend” and “spam is not your friend.” Those spots began appearing last month but are now expanding to more locations.
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