Mark Zuckerberg - No One Should Apologize for Facebook

2/9/2017

Mark Zuckerberg, Founder, Chairman and CEO Facebook, Inc
1601 Willow Road
Menlow Park, CA 94025

Hi Mark,

Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this letter.  This is a little awkward, but I have decided this is the best way to reach out to the people in this world that are in a position to make things better for all of us.  This is one of the first letters of this kind that I have written.  I've chosen to write to you specifically because of your post on January 11 about improving Facebook in 2018. In my opinion you have to make a change very soon to protect your company. I have a few ideas for you, but I want to start with something very simple.  Stop apologizing.

I know you are getting a lot of heat from your critics regarding Russian meddling in our election, feeds that are cluttered with advertisements, frivolous status updates, fake Facebook friendships, cyber-bullying, etc.  I don't want to diminish these issues, but I think you are letting too much of the narrative focus on the negatives.  I have witnessed Facebook's positive impact in many ways in my life:

• Connecting people.  Facebook keeps me more informed about things happening with my family and friends.
• Fundraising.  I have heard about and helped people in need that I would have never heard about without Facebook
• Organ donor.  A friend of a friend of mine was able to connect to an organ donor after putting out a plea for help on your site.
• Emergencies.  A family member was able to keep all of us informed in real time about a personal tragedy they were going through. Facebook made this simple and fast.
• Entrepreneurship. I am starting my own business and getting the word out on Facebook and other social media sites.  I receive almost daily encouragement from your site to keep active and keep pushing.  This is helpful for someone like me who is just getting started.  I don't like asking for help but I get it from Facebook every time I need it.

I think you should be proud of what you have accomplished so far, and you need to highlight what Facebook is already doing to improve the world.  Don't let your critics control the narrative.  I think the best way to do this is to stop apologizing, but keep improving and focusing on your contributions to the public good.  Make yourself and Facebook impervious to the criticism by constantly building up your collection of success stories.

Up to this point your hard work has been rewarded with wealth, prestige and power, but if you want to sustain this revolution and keep Facebook relevant, you have to get beyond these forms of wealth and start working for something more valuable.  You have changed the world already.  Now you have an opportunity to be one of the great humanitarians of our time. 

With all the behavioral information you have about users, you know more about us than many of our closest friends.  This information forms a massive database that can make each users' life much better if used ethically.  You are standing at the very edge of this revolution and you have the power to carry it forward.  You just have to use the information in a benevolent and philanthropic way and more success and wealth for you and your shareholders will follow.  Engagement will increase exponentially once the community understands the gravity of what is happening.  You are not just connecting people.

I know you can't drop all your projects and initiatives and focus only on benevolence.  You have plenty of people working on ways to make Facebook more profitable.  Here are a few ideas that I think can help make Facebook more positive and more respected by your users and critics:

1. Give money back to the users.  We all know you make money by selling ads.  The reason companies buy these ads is to reach us. They want to sell to us and you are the middle man.  Why not share the wealth?  This could be achieved via a profit sharing plan with your users instead of your employees.  This could easily be built in a way that rewards the behavior you find most valuable.  For instance, those users that reach X number of hours of use and watch Y number of paid advertisements receive a one-time payment of a few dollars. You could build hundreds of separate incentives and rewards.  This could turn Facebook use into a game of its own.  Even if these are relatively small rewards you will be giving back to the people who matter most, your users.  For a lot of people the small amount of dollars won't be that important, but reaching milestones will influence behavior.  Also, give users the option of taking the payments in cash or contributing them to a charity.  The charity option will be the poison pill that shuts down any critics that think the incentive payments are just a way to buy someone's time at a ridiculously low cost/hour.  You can highlight and keep a very public tally of all the money contributed to charity on behalf of the user incentive plan. That leads me to my next point.

2. Let users contribute money and have influence on your charitable efforts. You could turn your social network into a collective board of directors for your foundation, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI).  You and your wife, Priscilla, are just getting started with your philanthropic efforts.  How awesome would it be to include the source of your wealth, the Facebook users, in the decision making on how your wealth will be distributed to improve our society.  You and Priscilla have already signed The Giving Pledge so we know you plan to give away the vast majority of your wealth.  Let me just take a minute and give you my personal thanks for making that commitment.  You two should have ultimate authority about what happens to this money, but let us influence and contribute.  You pick the priorities in each of the CZI initiatives (Education, Justice & Opportunity, and Science), but let us vote on the order of priority or allocation of the user incentive payments to each area.  I have dozens of ideas of how to integrate the users and your foundation.  It would completely change what we do with Facebook and through Facebook.  We can be a part of your legacy.

3. Give users an ad-free option.  I know I'm not the first person to bring this up.  I've read all the pros and cons of this idea and the majority opinion in the public sector is that this would be bad for your bottom line and your advertisers would revolt.  Those Facebook users who could afford to pay a monthly subscription fee to opt out of ads are the very demographic the advertisers are trying to reach.  The value of each ad would drop with each individual who opted for an ad-free experience.  I'm sure a team of people have run a thorough quantitative analysis of this option showing the offsetting revenue gains from subscriptions and losses in ad revenue.  (If this hasn't been done, we need to do it ASAP.) My guess is the numbers didn't work out and the lost ad revenue would not be fully replaced with subscriptions.   I still believe this is worth bringing up just in case a couple of my ideas have not been fully considered or analyzed.  These are not subscription ideas, Facebook would still be free to users:

• Ad-Free Limited Use - Give users a product with reduced functionality that is ad-free.  Take away some of the features that make Facebook awesome or limit time on the site if they want to be ad free.  You could do this on an opt in basis for existing users and make it an option at sign up for new users.  If you cap their time on site and they hit the mark, give them an option of watching advertisements and refilling their time allotment.  This isn't a new idea, plenty of free apps do this already, but it could help increase visibility of ads on Facebook without cluttering up the news feed.

• Ad-Free +1 - Give users an ad-free option that limits them to one ad per login.  As soon as you login you get hit with a 30 second ad, then you are all clear for the rest of the login.  You would have to have a rule around inactivity for a certain amount of time for people who are always logged in, but you could easily work that out.  I believe this would actually help increase length of stay on the site for many users.  People will stay on and stay active longer in an effort to not have to watch another ad on a fresh login.  I believe this will lead to more thoughtful engagement for those users who would be spending their time connecting with people they care about, not scrolling past ads.

• Community Service - Create an ad free option that requires a certain level of "community service" from the user.  You could create categories of service that a user could sign up for to keep their feed ad-free.  Service could include work that is currently being done by Facebook administrative staff; policing content, helping new users get comfortable with features, product ambassador, research analysis, etc.  Users could also earn service credit by posting about the philanthropic activities of CZI or verified charitable organizations on Facebook.  I could write a few pages on this idea alone, but you get the picture.

4. Make your user behavioral data available to a disinterested third party that will analyze trends, identify risks, and publish their findings on a regular basis.  This one is much more sensitive and would certainly cause some challenges for your company.  This information is the cornerstone of how you monetize Facebook.  Opening it up to the public would be a big risk and could make you more vulnerable to competitors/copycats.  It may also be upsetting to the general public when they see just how much this information can be used to manipulate our behavior and thinking.  If you take this move proactively your shareholders are going to be skeptical to say the least, but you can easily spin this in your favor.  I believe there is a very real threat that you will have to go down this road at some point in the near future anyway.  The whispers of this idea are already circulating among lawmakers and regulators.  You might as well get in front of it and do this on your terms.  Be a leader and control the narrative.

I could dive a lot deeper into each of these ideas, but I have already taken too much of your time so I'll wrap this up where I started.  You don't need to apologize anymore for Facebook.  It is an amazing invention and it has grown into something that is truly revolutionary.  Now, it's time to take it to the next level.  Don't give an inch to your critics.  We all have free will to use or not use your service and the public has spoken loud and clear that we are engaged and are not going anywhere.  If you take even one of my ideas and run with it, it will make the Facebook experience better for all of us.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this letter.  I would love to help you implement these ideas.  Thanks again for signing The Giving Pledge and thank you for giving all of us Facebook.  No one, especially you, should ever feel like they need to apologize for it.

Sincerely,

Aaron Julian
ToTheBoss.com