How Mark Zuckerberg's competitiveness turned Facebook into a haven for misinformation and conspiracy theories
I still remember the first time I heard about Facebook. It was late 2005, and I was catching up with old friends who both attended a different university in the UK where the site had already established a following. They joked about their classmates who would post there all the time.
15 years later, it's easy to wonder how Facebook morphed from that early iteration into what it has become today.In recent months, posts and pages with misinformation about voting by mail and inflammatory allegations about politicians, as well as posts promoting armed right-wing militias and nazi symbolism, have spread across the social network, sometimes racking up millions of views.
To anyone who visited Facebook in its earlier, more innocent years, the new tone of Facebook might come as a shock. For most of its 16-year existence the company has been better known for its ability to dredge up ex-school friends and its catalogue of embarrassing old photos than for any monumental political influence and societal controversy. It happened gradually over a period of several years, enabled by a competitive urge to own the conversations that fuel social media, a pattern of tuning out warning signs and a need to stay in the good graces of politicians and government regulators.
And of course, it involves an $80 billion advertising business that grows larger the more that users of the social network stay active and engaged — regardless of what drives the engagement.
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