Skip to main content

Facebook

The Weekend Essay

Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet

Online platforms allowed me to cultivate a freer version of myself. Then the digital world began to close off.
Infinite Scroll

How Social Media Abdicated Responsibility for the News

The Israel-Hamas war has displayed with fresh urgency the perils of relying on our feeds for updates about events unfolding in real time.
Infinite Scroll

Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore

The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.
Letter from the Southwest

The Disturbing Rise of Amateur Predator-Hunting Stings

How the search for men who prey on underage victims became a YouTube craze.
Rabbit Holes

The Italy That’s Revealed by Italians on Social Media

A teacher in Tuscany collects the strange and beautiful images that capture what he calls “a marginal Italy.”
Cultural Comment

TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants

Facebook is trying to copy TikTok, but this strategy may well signal the end of these legacy platforms.
Infinite Scroll

The Age of Algorithmic Anxiety

Interacting online today means being besieged by system-generated recommendations. Do we want what the machines tell us we want?
Infinite Scroll

How the Internet Turned Us Into Content Machines

Two new books examine how social media traps users in a brutal race to the bottom.
Double Take

Sunday Reading: Social-Media Disrupters

From the archive: pieces on tech magnates and their impact on how we consume information.
A Reporter at Large

How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens

The inside story of the world’s most notorious commercial spyware and the big tech companies waging war against it.
Infinite Scroll

Pokémon Legends: Arceus, and the Allure of Open-World Video Games

Increasingly, what players are seeking is a virtual environment that feels as inexhaustible as the real one.
Letter from Silicon Valley

Money in the Metaverse

In a virtual world full of virtual goods, finance could get weird.
Books

How Politics Got So Polarized

In a new era of hyperpartisan identities, can anything bring “us” and “them” together?
The Political Scene Podcast

Lina Khan vs. Big Tech

The new chair of the Federal Trade Commission intends to change the way we treat monopolies.
Cultural Comment

The Question We’ve Stopped Asking About Teen-Agers and Social Media

Should they be using these services at all?
Daily Comment

The Meta Narrative: What We’ve Learned from the Facebook Papers

Thousands of documents uncovered by Frances Haugen reveal, among other things, how employees of Facebook—or Meta, as it’s now known—talk when they think that no one is listening.
Infinite Scroll

We Already Live in Facebook’s Metaverse

Who among us wants to inhabit an even more virtual world of Mark Zuckerberg’s creation?
The Political Scene Podcast

The Nobel Prize Winner Maria Ressa on the Turmoil at Facebook

Ressa, a Filipino American journalist, discusses the latest revelations of the social network’s failure to control disinformation and hate.
Shouts & Murmurs

What’s in a Name? A Brainstorming Session at Facebook HQ

Rebranding ideas from Sheryl: SunLight, Magic, Luminere. From Mark: I Am Not a Robot.
Shouts & Murmurs

Life in the Fantastic World of the Facebook Metaverse

Nazi propaganda, fraud, imagery with visible human female nipple—there was danger around every corner.