To understand Facebook’s betrayal, just look at my mom

Facebook makes my mother miserable. She knows it, and she’s disgusted with herself for nevertheless continuing to spend time scrolling through its endless updates. But I wish she knew that this seemingly self-sabotaging behavior is not her fault — it’s Facebook’s.

In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica and Internet Research Agency revelations, I realized that I didn’t actually view Facebook’s misdeeds or the evolution of its platform as that shocking or nefarious. Instead, they felt to me as inevitable and bumbling mistakes made by naive and greedy business people; mining all of our data for profit, and underestimating what bad actors could do with that information, was more or less what I expected from them.  Read more…

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