What Facebook Did to American Democracy: And why it was so hard to see it coming

This is a good article to mull over, thinking about the power that's very recently concentrated in the tech industry. Facebook and a few other big tech companies control information flows to an extent perhaps no other private company has before. Very few people understand just how much these platforms could change society, or how much they already have. Mark Zuckerberg downplays Facebook's influence, yet Facebook's own researchers publish papers on how many (generally younger, more liberal) people their voting button turned out in the last few years, or how much influence small changes to the computer algorithm which powers the "News Feed" has seemingly made to "happiness" in people's lives. The latter is particularly worrisome: part of how they've accomplished that is by hiding posts from the "other side" of the political spectrum, which may increase happiness/reduce stress when we're browsing Facebook, but it's also increasing partisanship, and may be locking us into extremist bubbles.

The big question is: "When is a company so big that society must regulate its behavior?"

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/arc...