Pattern Matching
The Protests Remind Us Why Social Media Is Worth Fixing
Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok are distorting our view of a crisis. But they’re also countering the distorted view we had before.
Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.
With protests raging, police violence surging, the pandemic simmering, and the president fanning the flames, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week defended his laissez-faire approach to online speech — and, in particular, to inflammatory posts by President Trump — in a 25,000-person video call with the company’s suddenly restive employees. “The net impact of the different things that we’re doing in the world is positive,” he reassured them, “even if every decision doesn’t go in the way that everyone wants.”
We’re talking about the social network whose most popular content in recent weeks has included the “Plandemic” anti-vaccine conspiracy video, which downplayed the risks of coronavirus, and a video in which the pro-Trump provocateur Candace Owens called George Floyd a “horrible human being.” The idea that it could be a net positive might seem laughable. But Facebook’s critics should not entirely write off the…
