This is from the first column I wrote for the Times two years ago about Facebook: “They have weaponized social media. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.”
Which is why malevolent actors continue to game the platforms and why there’s still no real solution in sight anytime soon, because they were built to work exactly this way.
And ever since, they have grown like some very pernicious kudzu and overtaken their inventors’ best efforts at control. Simply put, the inventors became overwhelmed by their own creations, which led to what I can only describe as a casual negligence, which led to where we are now
Mr. Zuckerberg stuck with this mix of extreme earnestness and willful naïveté for far too long.
Because what he never managed to grok then was that the company he created was destined to become a template for all of humanity, the digital reflection of masses of people across the globe. Including — and especially — the bad ones.
Call it the education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley, but on the world’s dime. How much that has — and will — cost is probably immeasurable.
Reading the whole thing two years later is both depressing and disturbing: nytimes.com/2018/08/02/opi…
