Facebook wants to nudge you into ‘meaningful’ online groups

At Facebook, mere sharing is getting old. Finding deeper meaning in online communities is the next big thing.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is no longer satisfied with just connecting the world so that people can pass around baby pictures and live video — or fake news and hate symbols. So the Facebook founder wants to bring more meaning to its nearly 2 billion users by shepherding them into online groups that bring together people with common passions, problems and ambitions.

Much like the creation of Facebook itself — often considered the largest social-engineering project in history — that shift could have broad and unanticipated consequences. Facebook will apply the same powerful algorithms that make its service so compelling to the task of nudging people to consider groups they’ll find equally appealing.

If successful, that would also encourage people to spend more time on Facebook, which could boost the company’s profit. While Facebook doesn’t currently place ads in its groups, it said it “can’t speak to future plans.” Advertising is Facebook’s only source of revenue; it brought in almost $27 billion in 2016, 57 percent more than the previous year.

Facebook continues to grapple with the darker side of connecting the world, from terrorist recruitment to videos of murder and suicides to propaganda intended to disrupt elections. For Zuckerberg, using his social network to “build community” and “bring the world closer together” — two phrases from Facebook’s updated mission statement — is a big part of the answer.

“When you think of the social structure of the world, we are probably one of the larger institutions that can help empower people to build communities,” Zuckerberg said in a recent interview at the company’s offices in Menlo Park. “There, I think, we have a real opportunity to help make a difference.”

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Zuckerberg outlined his latest vision at a “communities summit” Thursday in Chicago. It’s the first gathering for the people who run millions of groups on Facebook, a feature it introduced years ago to little fanfare. Facebook is also adding administrative tools intended to simplify the task of screening members and managing communities in hopes that will encourage people to create and cultivate more groups.

Facebook groups are ad hoc collections of people united by a single interest; they offer ways to chat and organize events. Originally conceived as a way for friends and family to communicate privately, groups have evolved to encompass hobbies, medical conditions, military service, pets, parenthood and just about anything else you could think of.

To Zuckerberg, now 33, the effort to foster meaningful communities reflects his recent interest in ways Facebook can make the world a less divisive place, one that emerged following the fractious 2016 presidential election.

He has previously talked about the need to bring people together in both a lengthy essay this year and during his commencement address at Harvard University last month.

That’s the theory. Practice is something else.

Data-driven to its core, Facebook has quantified “meaning” so it can be sure people are getting more of it. And Facebook wants people to spend more time in its online groups. Whenever someone spends at least 30 minutes a week in a group, Facebook classifies it as “meaningful.” The company estimates that 130 million of its users are in such groups; it wants that number to exceed a billion people within five years.

Facebook has already been changing its algorithms to recommend more groups to users. Those changes have boosted the number of people in “meaningful” groups by 50 percent over the past six months, Zuckerberg said — a testament to the power of algorithms on human behavior.

Barbara Ortutay and Michael Liedtke are Associated Press writers.