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Everyone knew that their next raise would hinge on whether they affected growth and sharing. They weren’t held accountable for much else.
The flurry of aspirational branded posts would manipulate the masses into feeling bad about their normal lives. The effect would depress some of the early Instagram employees, who had wanted so badly to build a community centered around the appreciation of art and creativity, and instead felt that they had built a mall.
It was becoming a competition. She advised parents that they should take an occasional social media detox to reset their priorities, explaining, “The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.”
If Facebook users were all in a digital town square, they were each listening to the public speaker Facebook thought they would find most interesting or urgent, while experiencing whatever companions and entertainment Facebook thought would please them. Then, without any knowledge of what someone else’s town square looked like, users were trying to make a decision collectively about who the mayor should be.
they wanted to err on the side of promoting free expression and limiting takedowns, embracing the solution that happened to be cheapest, necessitating the least human oversight.
