It has been ten years since Facebook’s IPO. Superficially, the experience is the same: news feed, friends network, third-party apps. Yet the feel of the site has completely changed. Whether it was the parade of casual game notifications, the injection of endless clickbait and memes, or the slow ossification of discourse into like-minded and frequently vicious agreement, Facebook doesn’t feel antisocial these days so much as alien: a parade of voices each occupying a small, hermetic sphere, mostly oblivious to each other. (Of course, the alternative of having these spheres interact, as on Twitter, is far worse.)
I have seen tenured university professors post the most simple-minded memes about everything from manspreading to microaggressions. I have seen published writers buy into conspiracy theories around Trump and Biden alike. I have seen a sheer unity of sentiment dominate on issues from Covid-19 to Ukraine, demarcating increasingly limited bounds of dissent. I have watched people go from dismissing masks to evangelising them, from criticising mass media to reposting MSNBC (or Fox), from attacking Big Pharma to worshiping at the altar of Pfizer. I have seen civil wars over pronouns, literary awards, and memes. Throughout it all there has been increasing intolerance within every micro-sect, the price of disagreement turning far more quickly into stigma than ever before.
Ten years ago it was different. A general sense of bonhomie and celebration reigned. Discussion was polite; when there was disagreement, it petered out into acceptance of differences. More than anything, there wasn’t any particular impression that Facebook was looking over our shoulders at the discussion. And there wasn’t any particular sentiment that discussion mattered. We were sitting around a water cooler, shooting the shit, talking about politics and society as we would about baseball. Today, there is the incessant sense that every discussion counts, the insecure paranoia that any deviation from the right moral path is just a step down the slippery slope toward fascism — or communism, take your pick.
Is Facebook responsible for this evolution? Yes and no. Facebook the company is only partly responsible, but Facebook the service absolutely is. The heightened tone of political discourse since Brexit and Trump’s election has put the fear of god into elites and hoi polloi alike, every side convinced they are losing ground to forces with unchecked power. The Trump years became a nonstop doomscroll of panic in every direction at once. A brief glance at the other side was no better: evil corporations and Congress were hamstringing Trump’s attempts to clean the swamp, whether it was Google, George Soros, or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
And yet it is Facebook that has done more than any person or company — except possibly Twitter — to produce this outcome. The story begins with FarmVille.
In the beginning, Facebook lacked a clear revenue model. Computers could learn what Amazon users wanted to buy and what Google search users were interested in, but it was hard for them to figure out what Facebook users wanted because most of the time they were just talking, and computers do not understand human speech well.
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