Facebook is unfixable

The platforms problems are a feature, not a bug

Facebook.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock)

Lately I've taken to joking to friends that the only terrorism I could support is blowing up Facebook's physical data centers, provided you could somehow do it without hurting anyone. I know, I know — casualties aren't the only way this destruction could harm people. Jobs would be lost, there would be unintended consequences I wouldn't like, and so on. I don't actually want these facilities to explode. But I do want Facebook to go away forever. I have come to believe it is unfixable.

Consider the tweak Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday: The site will permanently stop suggesting political groups to users, and the Facebook team is looking for other ways to reduce political content in users' feeds as well. "We will still let people engage in political groups and discussion if they want to," Zuckerberg said. But "[w]hat we are hearing is that people don't want politics and fighting to take over their experience on our service." Facebook "can potentially do a better job," he added, of which this change is only one step in a plan the network will gradually globalize.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.