Here is the interesting bit: "Mr. Zuckerberg announced he was changing Facebook product managers’ goal from helping people find relevant content to helping them

Here is the interesting bit: "Mr. Zuckerberg announced he was changing Facebook product managers’ goal from helping people find relevant content to helping them interact more with friends and family." What this did not take into account -- and I suppose it is easy to see in hindsight -- is that the Buzzfeed social justice stuff is proselytized by people you know. We have all heard various people "going no contact" with "toxic" (as in "masculinity") on Facebook and other social media. When people get into social justice, they constantly hammer the people they know about it, doing "call-outs" and "checking privilege." This does not happen to strangers, it happens to people they know ... just like a recent convert to a religion can become an irritant with their newfound beliefs and their attempts to work it into conversation on almost any pretext. Here is another type of example for you: check your various feeds about COVID. One group is "they are killing us with their refusal to vaccinate" and the other is "they are killing us with these vaccines." Nobody is convincing anybody else, it is just yelling across the aisle. More sharing between people you know just means more yelling. Facebook focused on the easy part -- who, upon which they already have a firm grasp -- rather than the hard part, what, namely trying to automate some kind of machine understanding of content. It's the what which is divisive and angry, not the who. My friend's wife shares photos of her garden and her chicken, fine. But she goes on and on and on about COVID, about four-fifths of her posts are about it. I'm already vaccinated, I am tired of hearing about it. And the people who are not vaccinated by now are not going to be convinced by yelling at them constantly, but it sure feels good to yell about the bad people, whoever they are. We saw this all before with the various Christian fears about D&D in the 1980s and the Satanic panics. It's just a new flavor of people yelling at those nearby: friends and family. Now it is mediated by Facebook, Instagram, and the like.