When we look at the various crises that Facebook has faced in the past couple of years, people talk about them as failures or breakdowns or meltdowns. In fact, it’s just the opposite. None of these are mistakes—they're fulfillments of a vision.

Facebook intended to connect billions of people. It intended to create an algorithm that would favor engagement around highly emotional content. It intended to create an advertising platform that was more efficient, more accurate, and more specialized than any that had ever been created. These features were all intentional. And they have produced almost every negative externality that we've seen come out of Facebook. Those externalities are a fulfillment of Facebook’s design.