Wired spoke to 51 current or former Facebook employees about the past two years at the company. Though the stories varied, they all told a similar tale: of a company and a CEO who “techno-optimism” had been crushed when they learned about all the ways their platform had been used for ill. Wired writes that all the employees spoke of how the company is attempting to redeem itself. Facebook’s growth and power is the result of our information era. It started as a way to connect with your friends at Harvard and grew into a way to connect everywhere. You could then use it to login to other sites, and you could use messenger to talk to friends in other countries. You could mark that you were safe after a disaster. But on the other hand, Facebook’s growth was predetermined. Zuckerberg has been an almost ruthless steward of the company’s manifest destiny and has a way of knowing where to place his bets. But Facebook did not think through carefully the implications before becoming a dominant force in the news industry. Facebook hired few journalists and spent little time discussing the big questions that plague the media industry. Over the past year, Facebook’s fundamental understanding about whether it’s a publisher or a platform has been altered. The company has always said platform, but gradually, it has evolved. The company realizes now it bears some of the responsibilities that a publisher does: “for the care of its readers, and for the care of the truth. You can’t make the world more open and connected if you’re breaking it apart.”
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