Facebook's antitrust trial in Washington D.C. is into its second week. And along with the usual reams of impenetrable legalese that dominate such proceedings, a few enlightening gems have emerged from the mountain of paperwork released by the U.S Federal Trade Commission. How about the fact that Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea of deleting every Facebook user's friends list? Yes, really.
During a series of emails starting in 2022 and collated from court documents by TechCrunch, Zuckerberg discussed his fears concerning Facebook's declining relevance. "Even though the FB app’s engagement is steady in many places, it feels like its cultural relevance is decreasing quickly," Zuckerberg fretted.
His solution? Delete your friends list and introduce a new structure around following rather than friending. "Friending feels out of vogue right now for at least a few reasons. First, a lot of people’s friend graphs are stale and not filled with the people they want to hear from or connect with," he said.
"One potentially crazy idea is to consider wiping everyone’s graphs and having them start again. This obviously carries the risk that if we did that then a lot of people just wouldn’t rebuild their graphs or would become less engaged, so if we wanted to consider this we’d have to build out an experiment and test it in a smaller country to make sure it led to a positive result.
"I think we’d need to do something relatively extreme like this to move the needle though and I don’t think small things like spring cleaning flows would move the needle,” Zuckerberg went on.
Desperate measures, to say the least. But then it seems like Facebook is facing desperate times.
"It feels heavyweight to request someone new as a friend," Zuckerberg lamented. "Most of the time when I meet someone or become interested in someone I just want to follow them first but not ask anything of them."
So, after nuking your friends list, the next step would be to replace friending with following. "The way to rectify this would be to fully adopt following. If we wanted to do this, I don’t think that simply supporting following for public accounts would be sufficient. I think we’d have to switch from friending to following on private accounts as well," Zuckerberg mused.
Thus far, Facebook hasn't made that leap of faith to following rather than friending, never mind wiping everyone's friends lists. But it certainly says something that such extreme measures are are even being considered.
