Facebook

Not all inventions change the world. But some do — and they do it by greatly lowering the cost of a fundamental economic input. This inevitably causes an economic revolution that brings about a new political and social order by opening previously impossible economic opportunities,  creating vast new wealth in the process. We are in the middle of such a revolution today, thanks to the microprocessor, which first came to market in 1972 and really took off with the introduction of the personal computer in the early 1980s. The microprocessor, a dirt-cheap computer on a chip, hugely reduced the cost of storing, retrieving and manipulating information. Computing power that cost $1,000 in the 1950s today costs a fraction of a cent.

On Tuesday, Frances Haugen, speaking to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, compared Facebook to tobacco and opioids while pushing for similar regulations. Haugen, a 'whistleblower' who came forward after Facebook dissolved her team and who admits she never worked on child safety during her time at Facebook, told a terrifying story about an app that harms young girls. Social media is like a drug. We hear this all the time. We’re powerless addicts in the face of its influence. We need to keep the kids safe from it. But is it? And do we? I used to call myself a Twitter addict. It’s the first thing I check each morning and the last thing I look at at night.

Really, the Facebook outage should not have been as entertaining as it was. As Jon Stokes, the founder of Ars Technica, observes, if Facebook, with its hyper-sophisticated software and security practices, is vulnerable to sudden collapse, what does that say about energy infrastructure run on 'old Windows installs'? The potential for far greater carnage is tremendous. But it was entertaining, and I think what it made so was the fact that the damage was so comprehensive that security systems in the Facebook offices crashed and its employees could not enter the building to fix the problem. Here were some of the smartest people in the world and they could not get through a door. You can imagine the coffee cooling in their paper cups.

Good news everybody — you can finally post what you always thought about how the pandemic started on Facebook without being muzzled. The Silicon Valley giant, which has around 2.85 billion users, had been banning posts that claimed COVID-19 was man-made. But now, according to a company spokesperson, ‘In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made from our apps.’ The ‘lab-leak’ theory — that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China — has gradually gained mainstream acceptance in the months since Trump lost the election. Nicholson Baker horrified New York magazine readers in January by bringing up the hypothesis.

Someday, we’ll count them like fallen soldiers: the online platforms that began by promising to be different, an escape from the grind of endless internet flame wars, and ended up like all the others, captured by memeified outrage. The trajectory is always the same. Tumblr, originally a home for cheeky fanblogs with titles like ‘fuckyeahsharks!’, was overtaken in a few short years by the ‘Your Fave Is Problematic’ brand of outrage archaeology. Facebook started as a place to collect your photos, share updates about your lunch and platonically ‘poke’ your friends, only to devolve into a wasteland abandoned by virtually everyone except a bunch of angry boomers battling over whether or not Hillary Clinton does, in fact, eat babies. Twitter...

The Facebook Oversight Board has reached a decision on Donald Trump…kind of. The tech company’s ‘Supreme Court’ is upholding the move to restrict Trump’s ‘access to posting content on his Facebook page and Instagram account’. But the board deemed it ‘not appropriate’ to indefinitely suspend Trump from Facebook’s platforms, describing that penalty as ‘indeterminate and standardless’. The FOB wants Facebook to ‘determine and justify a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform’ in the next six months. In other words — they punted.

It’s been a full week since the New York Post published their first story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is currently in FBI possession. The purported contents of the laptop which were released selectively in several news stories by the Post include private emails and photographs. These have yet to be proven as forgeries or inauthentic. Swiftly cable news pundits and liberal-leaning journalists began wondering whether the laptop, the repair service in Delaware, or the source of the leak to the Post were part of a foreign campaign to influence the presidential election. But the DNI, FBI, DOJ and State Department all said there was no evidence to support those theories.

For decades, people worldwide have dreamed about being famous. What would it be like to live like a celebrity? To have even a glimpse of celebrity life? Well, as technology has been democratized, so has fame and the many trappings that come with it. People flock to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and YouTube to share their random thoughts, uninformed opinions, dance moves, animal photos, children’s names, and much more. The masses want to feel special. They want to be celebrated. They seek out an R.O.E. — return on ego — which comes with digital likes, comments and a hit of dopamine, instead of an R.O.I. —  return on investment — which allows you to pay your mortgage.

Some of America’s biggest businesses are withholding their ad spending from social media sites, in order to pressure these platforms into restricting or fact-checking posts from conservative users — under the guise of ‘opposing hate online’. On Friday, Unilever, the company behind household brands Lipton, Dove, and Axe, announced it would stop buying ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to encourage those sites to be a ‘trusted and safe digital ecosystem’. Unilever joined several other major brands boycotting social media advertising, such as Coca Cola, Denny’s, Honda, and Starbucks. This corporate pressure campaign is an unfortunate example of businesses bowing to the online mob.