The Man Behind Trump’s Facebook Juggernaut

The Man Behind Trump’s Facebook Juggernaut, By Andrew Marantz

“…Some of the public anxiety over Facebook is a response to how easily it can be abused, but much of that anxiety is about the outcomes the platform yields when it’s working as designed. Even leaving aside the Cambridge Analytica data breach and the allegations of foreign interference—even if nobody had ever violated any platform’s terms of service—many of the fundamental problems of social media still remain. Creepy surveillance, dissolution of civic norms, widening unease, infectious rage, a tilt toward autocracy in several formerly placid liberal democracies—these are starting to seem like inherent features, not bugs. The real scandal is not that the system can be breached; the real scandal is the system itself. In a sense, it’s almost comforting to imagine that the only bad actors on social media are Russian state assets, clickbait profiteers, and rogue political consultants who violate the law. If that were the extent of the problem, the problem could surely be contained.”

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