think about why people would share something—not just because they enjoyed it, but because the act of sharing would bring them closer to their friends, or say something about themselves.

measuring interest and intent, and channeling it into action.

by 2023 it seemed clear that the power of this new social energy had been to destroy any institution, from the media to the political establishment, that it touched. Those of us who work in media, politics, and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are

The company’s algorithm had shifted to prioritize “engagement,” rather than giving a simple thumbs-up. We’d entered a new world, one that Facebook and its critics alike would sometimes conceal behind mystifying technical language, but which boiled down to two things: metrics based on how much people were sharing, clicking, and talking about a piece

Facebook had succeeded in identifying what people would truly, meaningfully interact with, the things they would share and talk about. Their algorithm was holding an ever-more-precise mirror up to Americans’ psyches, and intensifying their strongest reactions. But the company’s obsession with metrics, with giving people exactly what they would

“The internet” had become, merely, society itself; the forces that had come to dominate it—populism to the right and the left, most of all—were social forces, not digital ones. The geniuses who succeeded in this era hadn’t dominated those forces. They had, like Trump, become their vessels; or, like Zuckerberg, offered them a channel. Jonah had

thought we were on the right side of the decade-old conflict between the transparent new internet and a legacy media whose power came in part from the information they withheld.

Trump was part of a pattern of confrontational, combative right-wing populism that swept the platform and the world. These leaders’ success on Facebook was no more complicated than their success on the mainstream media: they fed controversy and engagement. But while CNN and other mainstream broadcasters eventually began to rein in their own hunger

For decades, journalists’ incentives had been set pretty much by their editors: you wrote what you were assigned to write, or went where the natural evolution of a story took you. The blog years, and the early flickerings of traffic, had produced a new kind of media powerhouse, in which obscure and partisan figures like Drudge could reward you with