Facebook: Cracking the Code

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In 2014, Facebook scientists

published the results

of one of the biggest

psychological experiments

ever conducted.

They took almost 700-thousand

Facebook profiles

and deliberately skewed

their news feeds

to be either more positive

or more negative.

Then, they used the company's

sophisticated algorithms

to measure any shift

in people's mood.

Their findings?

The more positive the feed,

the happier Facebook users

seemed to be.

The more negative,

the more depressed they became.

It proved the power of Facebook

to affect what we think

and how we feel.

Facebook has very cleverly

figured out

how to wrap itself

around our lives.

It's the family photo album.

It's your messaging

to your friends.

It's your daily diary.

It's your contact list.

It's all of these things

wrapped around your life.

This is the story of how

one of the World's biggest

and most powerful

private corporations

is turning our lives and

our data into vast profits,

and in ways we have

no control over.

They are the most

successful company

arguably in human history

at just gathering people's time

and turning that time

into money.

Like his company,

Facebook's founder

hardly needs introducing.

Mark Zuckerberg started

the social media platform

13 years ago when he was just 19

as a site for Harvard

undergraduate students.

When we first launched,

we were hoping

for maybe 400 to 500 people.

Harvard didn't have a Facebook

so that was the gap

that we were trying to fill

and now we're at 100,0000 people

so who knows

where we are going next.

Within its first month,

more than half the students

had joined, setting the trend

for the membership explosion

that followed.

Now, almost a quarter

of the world's population

has signed on.

It is bigger than any country.

Facebook is now

a global colossus.

It is one of the world's

most valuable corporations,

worth over 400 billion dollars.

Mark Zuckerberg

is an international powerbroker

in his own right.

He's like a king, right?

He's like a monarch.

He's making decisions

about your life on Facebook,

what the rules are,

and he's a benevolent dictator.

You can't say this is

accountable governance

or a participatory governance

in any particular way.

But almost two billion users

still isn't enough for Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg is aiming

for the next billion.

There is a limit to how much

they can grow

in established markets like

North America and Australia.

But the 32-year-old businessman

sees huge potential

in the developing world.

There are a billion people

in India

who do not have access

to the internet yet

and if what you care about is

connecting everyone in the world

then you can't do that

when there are so many people

who don't even have access

to basic connectivity.

There's a term that's being used

by folks connected to

Facebook and Google

called the last billion

where they're basically trying

to figure out a way

to spread internet access,

but the internet

that they're going to spread

is an internet that's shaped by

Facebook and Facebook's agendas.

That's actually part

of the long game here.

Most people in a lot

of the developing world

are accessing the internet

through their mobile phones

and there are these programs

that are known as zero rating

or Facebook Zero

so when you get you smartphone,

you get free data

if you're using Facebook

and so people stay on Facebook.

They don't go anywhere else,

so that their whole world

on the internet

becomes very much the same

as, you know...

they don't know

any other kind of internet.

Facebook is a free service,

but that's because

Zuckerberg has learned

how to turn our data

into dollars. Lots of dollars.

Last year his company

earned 27-and a half billion US,

just under 16 dollars

for each user,

and he's buying even more

internet real estate.

Clearly there's one topic

we have to start with.

You bought WhatsApp

for 19 billion dollars.

Why did you do it

and what does it mean?

You can look at

other messaging apps

that are out there, whether it's

Cacao or Line or WeChat

that are already monetizing

at a rate of two

to three dollars per person

with pretty early efforts

and I think that shows

if we do a pretty good job

at helping WhatsApp to grow

that is just going to be

a huge business.

Facebook has WhatsApp,

Facebook has Instagram.

Facebook has Oculus Rift,

not necessarily mainstream

but these are very big

corners of the internet.

Should we be concerned

about a monopoly?

We should always

be concerned about monopoly.

We should always be concerned

about concentration of power.

We should always be concerned

about that

and we need to hold their feet

to the fire at all times.

Facebook is all about

community,

what people all around the world

are coming together to do -

connecting with friends

and family,

informing these communities.

Facebook presents itself

as a digital platform,

a neutral stage upon which

life plays out.

2016:

we all went through it together

It says it is a company that

develops digital technology,

not social engineering.

For all the talk

about community,

Facebook is neither democratic

nor transparent.

Any place we go to

that is not truly open,

that's not governed by us

as users,

that's not governed by

some democratic accountability,

is actually a place

that is not truly ours.

It's a place that we can use,

it provides great value

in many ways,

don't get me wrong,

to its users.

But it's incorrect to see it

as a neutral place.

It can do things

like a government

and indeed it has inherited

some government-like functions,

but I don't think that passes

the smell test

to imagine that Facebook

or any online platform

is truly democratic,

they're not.

If we tell the computer

to look at two numbers

and compare them and put

the larger number on one side

and the smaller one

on the other then,

with a series of steps

we will be able to reorder it.

To understand

how Facebook works,

we need to understand

what goes on under the hood.

The engine that drives the

system is built on algorithms -

sets of instructions

that Facebook's engineers use

to determine what we see

in our News Feed.

Dr Suelette Dreyfus,

an information systems expert,

demonstrates how

a basic algorithm works.

Typically, an algorithm might be

for processing some data

or doing some arithmetic,

summing something for example,

or it might be

to try and recreate

the decision-making process

that we use in our human brain

on a more sophisticated level.

Facebook's algorithms

were originally configured

to help Harvard University

students

stay in touch with one another.

They exploited the way

the students had

a small group of close friends,

and a wider,

looser social circle.

The algorithms are now

vastly more complex,

but exactly how they work

is a closely guarded

commercial secret.

We do know that they are

designed with one aim in mind -

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