Communications of the ACM
Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew
The truth is that Facebooks thirst for young users is less about dominating a new market and more about staving off irrelevance.
Credit: Delcan & Co.
One possible way to read "The Facebook Files," The Wall Street Journal's excellent series of reports based on leaked internal Facebook research, is as a story about an unstoppable juggernaut bulldozing society on its way to the bank.
The series has exposed damning evidence that Facebook has a two-tier justice system, that it knew Instagram was worsening body-image issues among girls and that it had a bigger vaccine misinformation problem than it let on, among other issues. And it would be easy enough to come away thinking that Facebook is terrifyingly powerful, and can be brought to heel only with aggressive government intervention.
But there's another way to read the series, and it's the interpretation that has reverberated louder inside my brain as each new installment has landed.
Which is: Facebook is in trouble.
From The New York Times
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