As Meta suits up for another round of lay-offs as part of its focus on improving operational efficiency, cracks are starting to show within its operational framework. Along with this are rising problems in ad ops, content moderation, and more. Not a fun time for Meta, we presume.

Just To Let You Know…

Meta has been working to reduce its staff overheads, as part of its ‘Year of Efficiency’ focus, which comes in response to worsening global market conditions, which have led to a significant reduction in Facebook and Instagram ad spend. Meta also continues to invest billions into its next-level Metaverse experience. To maintain its focus on this element, it needs to better rationalize staff and ensure that it’s spending in key areas, as opposed to more experimental and speculative projects.

To sum things up, Meta has already culled around 13% of its workforce – with more slated just around the corner. The next wave of layoffs is set to be implemented sometime this week, and according to The Washington Post, Meta insiders are increasingly concerned that these latest cuts will impact its content moderation and safety processes, which could limit Meta’s efforts on this front.

True enough, Facebook has long been the focus of investigations into political manipulation and messaging, and while it has improved its systems since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016, the concern now is that if it lets up, we could see a resurgence in misuse for similar purposes.

Meta has increasingly leaned on AI to help address such, which is also improving and may well now be at the stage where Meta can more safely put increased reliance on such systems over human verification. However, it’s a risky premise, which could lead to a new wave of concerns stemming from Facebook campaigns.

On another front, ad buyers are reporting increasing and ongoing errors with Meta’s ad systems, following a major Facebook Ads error last month that caused significant campaign overspend. A month later, Meta’s still applying corrections, while marketing teams are also running into some ad set updating troubles, as well as a slew of other issues.

The Wrap

For most users, both Meta and Twitter, relatively, don’t have to deal with a metric crap ton of external issues as a result of reduced oversight, born of major staff cuts. Internally, however, things are a bit different – various issues seem to be stacking up, causing major headaches in specific usage and reducing paid ad campaign performance. If Twitter’s example is anything to go by, Meta might still be functioning ‘normally’ right now, but more staff cuts will only lead to more operational strains for its systems. For the time being, it would be best to brace yourself for some back-end hiccups over the next months.

Sources

https://bit.ly/3BRVcoH