Learnings from Meta's Crises
A post-mortem the unintended consequences of business model & design choices
Ridiculed as "attention casinos," the architecture of social media optimizes for engagement, not understanding. That means outrage and vanity systematically outperform nuance and truth. So while it has produced real good (i.e. connecting families, enabling movements) its incentive structure tilts toward psychological manipulation. In civic terms, the harm bias is baked into the machine. The internet is currently shaped to the demands of an advertising economy.
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FB Alumni Contrition

  • Former Facebook executive: social media is ripping society apart

  • Opinion | It’s Time to Break Up Facebook (Published 2019)

    • Internet.org / FreeBasics

  • Is Connectivity a Human Right? [Public Memo]

  • Internet.org is a failed exercise in misdirection

    • Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar

  • An Independent Assessment of the Human Rights Impact of Facebook in Myanmar

  • A War of Words Puts Facebook at the Center of Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis

    • Growth at all costs

  • The Ugly [2016 internal memo + Buzzfeed commentary]

    • Proposed Solutions

  • The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure

  • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

  • Tennessee Attorney General Files Unredacted Complaint Against Meta Platforms, Inc.

  • Kara Swisher has no plans to stop calling out Big Tech CEOs

  • Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show