Is the Tech Press Bad? With The Verge's Casey Newton

“One day you’re beating up on Facebook for leaving up too much hate speech, and the next day, you’re beating up on them for taking down too many legitimate ads.”

There’s a really interesting discrepancy between the internal and the external conversation around Facebook right now, because the external conversation is a lot of like, “Are these people good or evil? What are they doing to the world?”

And I think one reason why you see so much frustration with Facebook is the same reason you see so much frustration with YouTube and with Twitter. It’s the sense that these things are so powerful to the way that we communicate and live our lives online. And yet, you and I really have no say in how any of them operate.

And the internal questions at Facebook that Zuckerberg is getting during his weekly Q&As are all about remote work, how long is it going to last, who’s going to have to go back to the office, who’s going to get their pay cut, how much is my pay going to be cut if I move to Omaha or whatever.

Facebook is so big that it is always going to be a thousand different things at the same time. There’s 500 places where it’s doing something really cool and interesting, and there’s 500 places where it’s doing something really scary and in need of intervention.

I think there are three algorithms that have reshaped the American press in ways that we are just now starting to confront. You have Google and Facebook, which can serve up this incredible fire hose of traffic to publishers so long as they cater to the ever-shifting whims of that algorithm.