How the World Got Wired · The Social Graph

The Costs

I now have to tell you the parts of this story that are hardest.

The Facebook your grandmother uses to share her sunset is, in many ways, a wonderful thing. Long-distance families stay in touch in ways they could not before. People find each other across the world — old classmates, lost relatives, communities of people with rare interests or shared experiences. The teenager I am imagining you to be, when you read this, has probably been to a birthday party that was planned through a Facebook event, or has a relative whose recovery from an illness she heard about from a Facebook post.

But there have also been other things.

In the years leading up to 2016, Facebook’s News Feed became one of the main ways Americans got their news. It was free. It was easy. The stories that appeared in the feed were the ones the system had calculated would interest each user. The system was very good at calculating this. But it had no opinion about whether the stories were true. Many of them were not. False stories — about politicians, about events, about other countries — spread on Facebook faster than true stories, because false stories were often designed to be shocking, and shocking stories generated more clicks and comments and shares, and the system was tuned to promote anything that generated clicks and comments and shares. By the time of the 2016 American presidential election, very large numbers of completely fabricated stories were being read by tens of millions of people. Some of those false stories had been written, deliberately, by foreign governments trying to influence American voters. Facebook, after years of public pressure and congressional hearings, eventually acknowledged this and began trying to address it. The work is ongoing. It has not been fully successful.

In 2017 and 2018, in the country of Myanmar, in Southeast Asia, the government and military used Facebook to spread hateful messages about a religious and ethnic minority group called the Rohingya. The messages encouraged violence. The violence happened. Approximately seven hundred thousand Rohingya people fled to neighboring countries. A United Nations report on the killings directly named Facebook as having played a determining role in the events. Facebook later admitted it had not done enough to stop the use of its platform to organize violence.

In 2021, an internal whistleblower from Facebook — a researcher named Frances Haugen — released internal documents showing that the company’s own studies had concluded that Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing app, was causing harm to the mental health of teenage girls. Specifically, the research found that teenage girls who used Instagram heavily were more likely to feel bad about their bodies and themselves. The company had known this for years. It had not acted on the findings. Haugen testified before Congress. There were apologies. There were promises. The product, by and large, continued to operate the way it had before.

These are not the entire story of Facebook. The good things I described earlier are also part of the story. But you should know the bad things, because they are real, and because they did not happen by accident. They happened because the system was designed to maximize engagement, and engagement turns out to include people getting angry, getting scared, hating each other, feeling worse about themselves, believing things that aren’t true. The system did not know, or care, the difference between healthy engagement and unhealthy engagement. It just measured engagement.

Mark Zuckerberg, twenty years after Facemash, is now one of the richest people in the history of the world. His personal fortune is estimated, depending on the day, at somewhere around two hundred billion dollars. He still controls Facebook — which renamed itself Meta in 2021 — through a special class of shares that give him more votes than any other shareholder, no matter how much stock other people buy. He cannot be removed by his own board. In this way, the structure of his company is unusual. It is closer to a kingdom than a typical American corporation.

He has, over the years, said many different things about what he believes his company should do. He has changed his political stances. He has invested heavily in something he calls the metaverse — a kind of immersive virtual world — that has not, so far, attracted as many users as he hoped. More recently, he has redirected the company’s enormous resources toward artificial intelligence, which is the topic of the last several chapters of this book.

The world is still arguing, and will for many years, about what to make of what he built. The two extremes — that Facebook is mostly a good thing, that Facebook is mostly a bad thing — are both, I think, too simple. Like everything else in this book, the truth is more complicated. The same product has connected your grandmother to you across an ocean, and has helped, in another country, to facilitate a genocide. It has hosted the world’s strongest fundraising campaigns for medical care, and it has hosted some of the world’s most effective propaganda. It has given lonely people communities, and it has made many young people lonelier. It is one thing and many things at once.

Like the iPhone in the last chapter, social media is something you will live with for the rest of your life. The most useful thing you can do — much more useful than deciding it is wholly good or wholly bad — is notice clearly what it does to you and to the people around you, and to make small, repeated decisions about how much of yourself you give to it.

What’s Next

Before we leave the topic of social media, though, there is one more piece of the story we need to look at.

The biggest social media app in the world right now — the one many kids your age spend more time on than any other — was not made in the United States. It was made in China. And the simple fact of where it was made, combined with the simple fact that when an American kid lands at the airport in Beijing and connects to the local Wi-Fi, almost none of the apps and websites we have spent the last several chapters describing actually work, opens up a part of this story we have not yet looked at.

The internet you have been reading about for sixteen chapters — the open global network that Cerf and Kahn designed, the no-boss network from Chapter 5, the home of Silicon Valley’s giants — is one version of the internet. It is the American version.

There is more than one version.

That’s Chapter 17.

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