From Bloomberg, how Facebook’s political unit enables the dark art of digital propaganda. Facebook’s 2016 election team gave advertisers a blueprint to a divided US. Former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya says social media is ripping apart society (and more). Facebook slowly realizing it might be ruining democracy. Facebook’s political nightmare is getting worse ahead of the 2018 midterms. Ban Facebook before elections: The company refuses to regulate fake news, so the U.S. government should regulate the company. Facebook, Donald Trump, and the myth of open platforms: Facebook got a lot wrong in 2016 — but it wasn’t alone.
The case against Facebook’s neutrality: How the social network’s laissez-faire ideology plunged it into crisis. “This is serious”: Facebook begins its downward spiral. Facebook is a “living, breathing crime scene”, says one former tech insider. How Trump consultants exploited the Facebook data of millions. “I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool”: Meet Christopher Wylie, the data war whistleblower. What took Facebook so long? Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade — the latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them. Anne Applebaum on why Facebook is afraid of Robert Mueller.
Inside Facebook’s hellish two years — and Mark Zuckerberg’s struggle to fix it all. What if a healthier Facebook is just Instagram? How to fix Facebook’s phony feed problem: It’s fun and easy. Roger McNamee on how to fix Facebook — before it fixes us. Facebook can’t be fixed: Facebook’s fundamental problem is not foreign interference, spam bots, trolls, or fame mongers — it’s the company’s core business model, and abandoning it is not an option. Facebook’s purpose is digital addiction: How concerns about the social-media platform’s targeting of younger users apply to everything it does. Om Malik on the #1 reason Facebook won’t ever change.
