The Meta CEO admitted that he didn’t anticipate the current trajectory of social media.
The face of social media has changed significantly since its initial inception. Compared to the early days of the concept, where sites like MySpace or Facebook allowed people to connect over the internet, modern social media is more about discovering new and interesting content through the feed format. This is how platforms like TikTok have rocketed to the top, while platforms like Facebook have been left behind.
In an interview with Ben Thompson for Statechery, Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted that he didn’t anticipate the current paradigm of social media. Social media has, in his words, “by and large shifted to you use your feed to discover content, you find things that are interesting, you send them to your friends in messages and you interact there.”
“So in that world, it is actually somewhat less important who produces the content that you’re finding, you just want the best content,” Zuckerberg said.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that TikTok is a “very effective competitor,” and that his own company was ″somewhat slow to this because it didn’t fit my pattern of a social thing, it felt more like a shorter version of YouTube to me.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed to anticipate a newer trend in social networking that contributed to the success of rival TikTok.
By #CNBChttps://t.co/PFNPaQzqKa— OneLike (@OneLikeApp) October 14, 2022
Zuckerberg has posited that the best way for Meta and Facebook to compete with TikTok is to develop its own content-delivery algorithm further through the use of artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg hopes a developed AI could recommend not just videos to users, but text posts and photos.
