Writer at @WIRED. Author of NYT bestseller 'Chaos Monkeys'. Formerly @Facebook, @YCombinator, @GoldmanSachs. Yes, I live on a boat and in a yurt. 
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Journalists who cover Facebook and bristle at their haughty disdain and/or patronizing condescension, consider this illustrative example from Daniel Ellsberg, discussing a conversation he had with Kissinger. The problem is with asymmetric information.https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/02/daniel-ellsberg-limitations-knowledge/ …
Imagine you left your post at whatever outlet, and actually got a job as PM at Facebook, leading a team whose work you've covered. Suddenly, you've got access to all the dashboards and information flow of insiders. Your eyes will be opened to what was once dimly perceived.pic.twitter.com/872GXoQ9cl
You'll feel like a fool as you realize how much you missed seeing from the outside, and how partial your view once was. You'll also begin to understand the real scale of the challenge, and how limited even Facebook's resources are against billions of users and trillions of posts.pic.twitter.com/aPmvm7s36V
Turning back to your former colleagues in the press, you read their views and analysis, and begin to hold it in the same disdain you once resented. "If they knew what I knew, they wouldn't think as they do," you'll think to yourself, and dismiss what they say as uninformed.pic.twitter.com/GmBFv5PFG8
Given the chasm in understanding and information, you stop listening to the press, and treat them only as a PR problem to be managed. The FB comms team sends you emailed summaries of the day's coverage, highlights what needs to be dealt with, and you ignore the rest.pic.twitter.com/Cw004n3CvZ
Eventually though, you realize that your privileged viewpoint is also blinding in its own way. Along with all that data come some big biases and assumptions about the world. As you deafen yourself to the outside world and its whining, you also miss out on some truths.pic.twitter.com/Qk1JfChSFe
As with most major conflicts, this one is made bigger because both sides are partially right. It *is* true that if most journalists knew what insiders know, they'd think very differently about Facebook and its attendant problems, and the media narrative would totally change.
But it's also true that FBers live inside a blinding miasma of values and assumptions: the world looks very different from Menlo Park (inside a Disneyland campus) than it does from a Rohingya refugee camp or a Brazilian favela. The journalists also see things FBers don't.
This is real FB pickle: Journalists with little information, reporting on insiders with better information (themselves blinded by a corporate culture that feels besieged and can't shake itself out of the FB perspective), read by a public that largely doesn't understand any of it.
Unlike Kissinger though, the journalists are never getting clearances. FB does a uniquely bad job at conveying their view, and journalists aren't really incentivized to understand it anyhow. They're as captive to the media cycle as anyone, despite collectively creating it.pic.twitter.com/z5Prp5Odjy
The full impact of Facebook, or really the mass adoption of socially-connected smartphones, will only be understood decades from now. I suspect much contemporary coverage will seem silly in retrospect, but so will many of FB's actions.
Personally, I try to ignore the fleeting hangups of the FB commentariat (e.g. Cambridge Analytica), and focus on the bigger technology shifts. Take the recent example of WhatsApp, which differs markedly from core FB, and yet has caused much turmoil.https://www.wired.com/story/why-whatsapp-became-a-hotbed-for-rumors-and-lies-in-brazil/ …
My favorite anecdote!!!
It's such an instructive one, and Ellsberg frames it so perfectly.
There were some good responses to this here.https://twitter.com/sriramk/status/1053721181310701568?s=21 …
Hola the unroll you asked for: Thread by @antoniogm: "Journalists who cover Facebook and bristle at their haughty disdain and/or patronizing condescension, consider this illu […]" https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1059496512273534976.html …
See you soon. 
If Facebook is creating problems that are of too large a scale to solve, and the costs are things like an unprecedented attack on democracy and genocide, the solution is to end Facebook
Amazing language. Like being n the belly of a whale. Nausea
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