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Facebook said it’s making some far-reaching changes to what you see in your newsfeed. Soon, when you see a post, it’s more likely to be because a friend shared the link, rather than because you follow a media company or business that published it.
Reporter Michael Coren summed up the decision that founder Mark Zuckerberg outlined in a Facebook post:
“We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content—posts from businesses, brands and media—is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.”
That marks a tectonic shift for Facebook’s algorithm, which has been built to prioritize engagement (and monopolize users’ attention) above almost all other considerations. That has helped propel the company’s revenue to record highs, hitting about $34 billion last year, but the strategy has drawn fierce criticism for favoring inflammatory and misleading content. That criticism grew even fiercer after a 2016 election in which Facebook proved crucial for Donald Trump’s successful campaign to win the White House.
Facebook, like so much else in our world these days, is in a kind of crisis. In November, tech gadabout—and its one-time president—Sean Parker said the social network “exploits human psychology.” Indeed, that feeling of scrolling through the News Feed, dead-eyed but unable to stop, is something all of us have experienced.
The company expects usage and possibly revenue to dip, and Wall Street’s similarly merciless algorithms sent its stock price down 5%. As the Atlantic wrote, it looked like Facebook finally blinked. After years of relentless optimization—of purifying the product in order to better digitally drug users into staying on the site—it’s finally come around to the idea that while it can disrupt countless industries and products, there’s no business victory in disrupting the functioning of the human mind.
Or has it?
Yes, Zuckerberg may have realized his platform is not all-encompassing enough to turn humans into Matrix-like pod people (perhaps that’s a job for Facebook’s Oculus VR division). But this move was surely carefully designed, with product managers realizing that users who abandon social media are unlikely to return, while a cut-down dose of its drug might keep feed junkies hanging around longer, searching for that scrolling high. Ask any dealer—cutting the product is a better scenario than having users overdose and turn up dead. In Facebook’s case, “dead,” mercifully, would mean a user who quits the site cold turkey, and sets themselves free of social media. And that’s clearly not a world Zuckerberg wants to live in.—Paul Smalera
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The unregulated, misunderstood “life coaching” industry has never been more vibrant. And why not? Mixing old-fashioned therapy with new-fangled fandom, life coaching is about becoming a better you—often at hundreds of dollars an hour. Rosie Spinks delves into the latest iteration in the trend: Instagram life coaches. Selling both their own picture-perfect lifestyles and an ability to improve the lives of others, these coaches are part of a next-gen army of virtual improvement planners, just a tap away.
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California’s cartoon city upon a hill. On vacation at Disneyland, Jenni Avins found something unexpected: a hotbed of Trump resistance. As the US president made policy announcements on immigration, offshore drilling, and marijuana that many saw as a declaration of war on California, Avins saw subversion everywhere, from the “Viva Navidad” parade and the multi-ethnic cherubs of “It’s a Small World” to the Bears Ears-ish attraction at Grizzly Peak, and Crush the cartoon turtle, who frankly seemed stoned.
The question we ask every mom (but never dads). Kate Ryder is a startup CEO and mother who often gets asked, “How do you do it all?” Her husband is an equally busy executive at Google who, no surprise, does not get that question. Recently, they recorded a conversation between themselves, about about how their experiences as working parents differ.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
The Trump doctrine is ceding influence to China. While China has gathered strength, it has patiently waited for the right moment to assert itself as a new global leader. By backing the US away from global commitments and turning inward, Evan Osnos explains in the New Yorker, Trump has created an opening for Xi Jinping to commence projecting China’s influence abroad.
The weird, fake brands in your Instagram feed. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal investigates a company trying to sell him a suspiciously cheap jacket. He finds that it’s become ridiculously easy for anyone—for example a teenager in suburban Dublin—to patch together cheap Chinese-made goods, social media marketing, and off-the-shelf e-commerce services into a new breed of online retailer.
Tonya Harding is neither hero nor villain. For decades, the former Olympic figure skater brought down by the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan scandal has been the butt of jokes. Now she’s back in the public eye and gaining sympathy, thanks to the movie I, Tonya. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s profile for the New York Times Magazine pushes readers to consider the possibility that Harding is neither innocent nor evil, but a woman who had some bad breaks and made mistakes—and suggests that we would all do better to stop taking a binary view of humanity.
Your phone is wrecking your brain, by design. It’s really not your fault your memory has been damaged and you’re feeling more anxious. Facebook, Google and the like have become “little virtuosos of persuasion,” Eric Andrew-Gee writes in the Globe and Mail. There is hope, coming from the same source: The campaign to get you unhooked is being led by former Silicon Valley true believers.
Is everything you think you know about depression wrong? Prepare to be shocked by this excerpt from Johann Hari’s new book, Lost Connections: Uncovering The Real Causes of Depression–and the Unexpected Solutions, published in the Guardian. One quote detailing how Big Pharma settled on which of the thousands of mood-altering compounds it tested to turn into mega-drugs, like Prozac: “In one trial, the drug was given to 245 patients, but the drug company published the results for only 27 of them. Those 27 patients happened to be the ones the drug seemed to work for.” Based on the other revelations therein, the answer to the question posed above is almost undoubtedly yes.
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