Oddbean new post about login | logout I've written the series because I think that if we plow ahead with attempts to make new and better social platforms and tools without understanding the industry's recent history in relatively granular detail, we run the risk of making the same mistakes—or of failing to recognize major threats. The first post deals with Myanmar's ultra-optimistic crash entry to the internet—and outlines many warnings Meta received about its role in worsening ethnic tensions and violence in those years.
The second post, which is going up tomorrow unless my computer explodes, deals with the escalation into the 2016-2017 "ethnic cleansing" and genocide of the Rohingya and Meta's role in those events. The third post is about how Facebook as a platform became both an active accelerator for violence-inciting messages and a host for a truly massive covert fake-page network built to manufacture support for genocide. In the fourth post, I talk about what I think we should take from all of this.