It’s 2025. We’re barreling toward fascism, driven by a flood of disinformation that barely propelled our current president over the top. And now Facebook wants to go back to the way things were, with a revamped Friends feed that shows nothing but the people you care about.
It’s bullshit.
“Bringing the Magic of Friends Back to Facebook” is how Facebook calls it, in a saccharine “Live Laugh Love” motif that people who are not all right plaster their kitchen with in an effort to try and convince the world and themselves that everything’s OK.
“Bringing the Magic of Friends Back to Facebook” is a way to bring back the “OG” Facebook experiences, Facebook says. “OG” stands for “Original Gangster,” which seems particularly telling given that Facebook acted too late to prevent disinformation from swaying the 2020 election and how Facebook’s algorithm already divides the country into liberal and conservative bubbles.
If you don’t believe that Facebook is already a hive of algorithmically, AI-generated content designed to rile you up, misinform you, and ultimately cause you and whoever you interact with to disintegrate into a seething hate cauldron of steaming id, I don’t know what to tell you.
Sure, now is the time to get rid of all the programmatically generated content, and just see content from your friends. Hurray! Now that the cow’s out of the barn, we can clean up all the manure and go back to the way things were.
The obvious, clear answer would be to hire more content moderators. Pay them, and pay them well. Make a corporate commitment to filtering out disinformation and hate speech. Embrace diversity. Police the site. Do they do these things? Maybe? Do they do them well? Of course not.
Yes, I have to use Facebook for my job. I hate it. I hate seeing people I went to high school with get uglier — from the inside, I mean. I feel the same way about Facebook as I do about Uber, which basically came into being by basically trying to buy its way into legitimacy, and succeeding. I tolerate Threads, another Meta product, but at least Theads emerged as a response to Twitter and its (fill in the blank with whatever perjorative you want) owner. Facebook’s owner isn’t much better.
“The magic of friends has fallen away,” Facebook writes in its blog post explaining its decision. Well of course it has, you muppets. And you made it happen.