“The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.”

” No single machine should be able to control so many people.”

“How a group of friends ended up donating over $100,000 to a sick friend — who was perfectly fine.”

An internal memo from fired data scientist Sophie Zhang explains how Facebook knew that politicians around the world were engaged in “inauthentic activity” on the social network in order to manipulate voters.

“The company controls the communications and informational intake of more than two and a half billion people. It can feel impossible to comprehend its total influence—or to overstate its impact on journalism.” Jacob Silverman talks to over a dozen journalists in an attempt to understand what it’s like to cover Facebook.

Brad Parscale used social media to sway the 2016 election. He’s poised to do it again.

“I needed to convert my Facebook into something like a physical book, flip through its pages, prop open a window with it, and feel its weight in my hands. All of this would prove difficult, I later learned, because my Facebook was more than 10,000 pages long.”

“Pedophile hunting” or “creep catching” via Facebook is a contemporary version of a phenomenon as old as time: the humiliating act of public punishment. Criminologists even view it as a new expression of the town-square execution. But it’s also clearly a product of its era, a messy amalgam of influences such as reality TV and tabloid culture, all amplified by the internet.

The lucrative social media platform claims that it has improved the way it handles dangerous, harmful content, but its reliance on personal data harvesting has made it unwilling to effectively police its 2.7 billion users.