Dex Hunter-Torricke

One of the things that occurred during the first Trump administration onwards was Facebook started experimenting with reducing the volume of news and political content in some feeds because they discovered that people were getting to the point where they were so exhausted from the amount of political content that they said, oh, you know what?

This is bad for engagement.

Let's just get rid of the news.

And that's the thing where, hey, maybe that actually gave people some better experience in their life.

Maybe they spent more time.

That would be how Facebook would define a better experience.

But in fact, if your society's in flames,

wouldn't it be more responsible to actually share these things?

If you had a thesis that this is the global town square, that was literally how Jack Dorsey used to describe Twitter.

Yes, that's how they sold it, yes.

Then the global town square has to have all the conversations that matter in it, right?

Not just the ones that give you the easier life when you're living in Palo Alto or San Francisco.

That's right.

I think that's spot on.

And that is the complexity of this entire situation, right?

If they were just cartoonishly villainous, you know, like Zuckerberg was like, right, I'm going to like get these people's data.

And it's like, it was never like that.

In a way, it's like, you know,

The data is to fuel what Facebook really is, which is a big ad machine.

His ultimate evil is to give you some crappy click-baity ads in your feed.