In early January, I went to see Mark Zuckerberg at MPK20, a
   concrete-and-steel building on the campus of Facebook’s headquarters,
   which sits across a desolate highway from the marshy salt flats of Menlo
   Park, Calif. The Frank Gehry-designed building has a pristine nine-acre
   rooftop garden, yet much of the interior — a meandering open-plan hallway
   — appears unfinished. There are exposed air ducts and I-beams scribbled
   with contractors’ marks. Many of the internal walls are unpainted plywood.
   The space looks less like the headquarters of one of the world’s
   wealthiest companies and more like a Chipotle with standing desks. It’s an
   aesthetic meant to reflect — and perhaps also inspire employee allegiance
   to — one of Facebook’s founding ideologies: that things are never quite
   finished, that nothing is permanent, that you should always look for a
   chance to take an ax to your surroundings.

   The mood in overwhelmingly liberal Silicon Valley at the time, days before
   Donald Trump’s inauguration, was grim. But Zuckerberg, who had recently
   returned from his 700-acre estate on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, is
   preternaturally unable to look anything other than excited about the
   future. “Hey, guys!” he beamed, greeting me and [1]Mike Isaac, a Times
   colleague who covers Facebook. Zuckerberg wore a short-sleeve gray
   T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, which is his Steve Jobsian daily uniform:
   Indoor Zuck.

   Zuckerberg used to be a nervous speaker, but he has become much less so.
   He speaks quickly but often unloads full paragraphs of thought, and
   sometimes his arguments are so polished that they sound rehearsed, which
   happened often that morning. “2016 was an interesting year for us,” he
   said as the three of us, plus a P.R. executive, sat around a couple of
   couches in the glass-walled conference room where he conducts many of his
   meetings. (There are many perks to working at Facebook, but no one, not
   even Zuckerberg, has a private office.) It was an understatement and a nod
   to the obvious: Facebook, once a mere app on your phone, had become a
   global political and cultural force, and the full implications of that
   transformation had begun to come into view last year. “If you look at the
   history of Facebook, when we started off, there really wasn’t news as part
   of it,” Zuckerberg went on. But as Facebook grew and became a bigger part
   of how people learn about the world, the company had been slow to adjust
   to its new place in people’s lives. The events of 2016, he said, “set off
   a number of conversations that we’re still in the middle of.”

   Nearly two billion people [2]use Facebook every month, about 1.2 billion
   of them daily. The company, which Zuckerberg co-founded in his Harvard
   dorm room 13 years ago, has become the largest and most influential entity
   in the news business, commanding an audience greater than that of any
   American or European television news network, any newspaper or magazine in
   the Western world and any online news outlet. It is also the most powerful
   mobilizing force in politics, and it is fast replacing television as the
   most consequential entertainment medium. Just five years after its initial
   public offering, Facebook is one of the [3]10 highest market-capitalized
   public companies in the world.

   As recently as a year ago, Zuckerberg might have proudly rattled off these
   facts as a testament to Facebook’s power. But over the course of 2016,
   Facebook’s gargantuan influence became its biggest liability. During the
   U.S. election, propagandists — some working for money, others for
   potentially state-sponsored lulz — used the service to turn fake stories
   into viral sensations, like the one about Pope Francis’ endorsing Trump
   ([4]he hadn’t). And fake news was only part of a larger conundrum. With
   its huge reach, Facebook has begun to act as the great disseminator of the
   larger cloud of misinformation and half-truths swirling about the rest of
   media. It sucks up lies from cable news and Twitter, then precisely
   targets each lie to the partisan bubble most receptive to it.

   After studying how people shared 1.25 million stories during the campaign,
   a team of researchers at M.I.T. and Harvard [5]implicated Facebook and
   Twitter in the larger failure of media in 2016. The researchers found that
   social media created a right-wing echo chamber: a “media network anchored
   around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using
   social media as a backbone to transmit a hyperpartisan perspective to the
   world.” The findings partially echoed a long-held worry about social news:
   that people would use sites like Facebook to cocoon themselves into
   self-reinforcing bubbles of confirmatory ideas, to the detriment of
   civility and a shared factual basis from which to make collective,
   democratic decisions. A week and a half after the election, President
   Obama bemoaned “an age where there’s so much active misinformation and
   it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a
   Facebook page or you turn on your television.”

   After the election, Zuckerberg offered a few pat defenses of Facebook’s
   role. “I’m actually quite proud of the impact that we were able to have on
   civic discourse over all,” he said when we spoke in January.
   Misinformation on Facebook was not as big a problem as some believed it
   was, but Facebook nevertheless would do more to battle it, he pledged.
   Echo chambers were a concern, but if the source was people’s own
   confirmation bias, was it really Facebook’s problem to solve?

   It was hard to tell how seriously Zuckerberg took the criticisms of his
   service and its increasingly paradoxical role in the world. He had spent
   much of his life building a magnificent machine to bring people together.
   By the most literal measures, he’d succeeded spectacularly, but what had
   that connection wrought? Across the globe, Facebook now seems to benefit
   actors who want to undermine the global vision at its foundation.
   Supporters of Trump and the European right-wing nationalists who aim to
   turn their nations inward and dissolve alliances, trolls sowing
   cross-border paranoia, even ISIS with its skillful social-media recruiting
   and propagandizing — all of them have sought in their own ways to split
   the Zuckerbergian world apart. And they are using his own machine to do
   it.

   In Silicon Valley, current events tend to fade into the background. The
   Sept. 11 attacks, the Iraq war, the financial crisis and every recent
   presidential election occurred, for the tech industry, on some parallel
   but distant timeline divorced from the everyday business of digitizing the
   world. Then Donald Trump won. In the 17 years I’ve spent covering Silicon
   Valley, I’ve never seen anything shake the place like his victory. In the
   span of a few months, the Valley has been transformed from a politically
   disengaged company town into a center of anti-Trump resistance and fear. A
   week after the election, one start-up founder sent me a private message on
   Twitter: “I think it’s worse than I thought,” he wrote. “Originally I
   thought 18 months. I’ve cut that in half.” Until what? “Apocalypse. End of
   the world.”

   Trump’s campaign rhetoric felt particularly personal for an industry with
   a proud reliance upon immigrants. Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s campaign
   chief executive and now chief White House strategist, [6]once
   suggested that there were too many South Asian chief executives in tech.
   More than 15 percent of Facebook’s employees are in the United States on
   H-1B visas, a program that Trump has pledged to revamp. But the outcome
   also revealed the depth of the Valley’s disconnection with much of the
   rest of the country. “I saw an election that was just different from the
   way I think,” says Joshua Reeves, a Bay Area native who is a co-founder of
   Gusto, a human-resources software start-up. “I have this engineering brain
   that wants to go to this analytical, rational, nonemotional way of looking
   at things, and it was clear in this election that we’re trending in a
   different direction, toward spirited populism.”

   Underneath it all was a nagging feeling of complicity. Trump had benefited
   from a media environment that is now shaped by Facebook — and, more to the
   point, shaped by a single Facebook feature, the same one to which the
   company owes its remarkable ascent to social-media hegemony: the
   computationally determined list of updates you see every time you open the
   app. The list has a formal name, News Feed. But most users are apt to
   think of it as Facebook itself.

   If it’s an exaggeration to say that News Feed has become the most
   influential source of information in the history of civilization, it is
   only slightly so. Facebook created News Feed in 2006 to solve a problem:
   In the social-media age, people suddenly had too many friends to keep up
   with. At the time, Facebook was just a collection of profiles, lacking any
   kind of central organization. To figure out what any of your connections
   were up to, you had to visit each of their profiles to see if anything had
   changed. News Feed fixed that. Every time you open Facebook, it hunts
   through the network, collecting every post from every connection —
   information that, for most Facebook users, would be too overwhelming to
   process themselves. Then it weighs the merits of each post before
   presenting you with a feed sorted in order of importance: a
   hyperpersonalized front page designed just for you.

   Image

   [7]The News Feed team at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

   The News Feed team at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

   Credit...

   Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

   Scholars and critics have been warning of the solipsistic irresistibility
   of algorithmic news at least since 2001, when the constitutional-law
   professor Cass R. Sunstein warned, in his book “Republic.com,” of the
   urgent risks posed to democracy “by any situation in which thousands or
   perhaps millions or even tens of millions of people are mainly listening
   to louder echoes of their own voices.” (In 2008, I piled on with my own
   book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.”) In 2011,
   the digital activist and entrepreneur Eli Pariser, looking at similar
   issues, gave this phenomenon a memorable name in the title of his own
   book: “The Filter Bubble.”

   Facebook says its own researchers have been studying the filter bubble
   since 2010. In 2015, they published an in-house study, which
   was [8]criticized by independent researchers, concluding that Facebook’s
   effect on the diversity of people’s information diet was minimal. News
   Feed’s personalization algorithm did filter out some opposing views in
   your feed, the study claimed, but the bigger effect was users’ own
   choices. When News Feed did show people views contrary to their own, they
   tended not to click on the stories. For Zuckerberg, the finding let
   Facebook off the hook. “It’s a good-sounding theory, and I can get why
   people repeat it, but it’s not true,” he said on a call with analysts last
   summer.

   Employees got the same message. “When Facebook cares about something, they
   spin up teams to address it, and Zuck will come out and talk about it all
   the time,” one former executive told me. “I have never heard of anything
   close to that on the filter bubble. I never sensed that this was a problem
   he wanted us to tackle. It was always positioned as an interesting
   intellectual question but not something that we’re going to go focus on.”

   Then, last year, Facebook’s domination of the news became a story itself.
   In May, Gizmodo [9]reported that some editors who had worked on Facebook’s
   Trending Topics section had been suppressing conservative points of view.
   To smooth things over, Zuckerberg convened a meeting of conservative media
   figures and eventually significantly reduced the role of human editors.
   Then in September, Facebook [10]deleted a post by a Norwegian writer that
   included the photojournalist Nick Ut’s iconic photo of a naked 9-year-old
   girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, running in terror after a napalm attack during
   the Vietnam War, on the grounds that it ran afoul of Facebook’s
   prohibition of child nudity.

   Facebook, under criticism, reinstated the picture, but the photo incident
   stuck with Zuckerberg. He would bring it up unbidden to staff members and
   to reporters. It highlighted, for him, the difficulty of building a policy
   framework for what Facebook was trying to do. Zuckerberg wanted to become
   a global news distributor that is run by machines, rather than by humans
   who would try to look at every last bit of content and exercise considered
   judgment. “It’s something I think we’re still figuring out,” he told me in
   January. “There’s a lot more to do here than what we’ve done. And I think
   we’re starting to realize this now as well.”

   It struck me as an unsatisfying answer, and it later became apparent that
   Zuckerberg seemed to feel the same way. On a Sunday morning about a month
   after the first meeting, I got a call from a Facebook spokesman.
   Zuckerberg wanted to chat again. Could Mike and I come back on Monday
   afternoon?

   We met again in the same conference room. Same Zuck outfit, same P.R.
   executive. But the Zuckerberg who greeted us seemed markedly different. He
   was less certain in his pronouncements than he had been the month before,
   more expansive and questioning. Earlier that day, Zuckerberg’s staff had
   sent me a draft of a 5,700-word manifesto that, I was told, he spent weeks
   writing. The document, “[11]Building Global Community,” argued that until
   now, Facebook’s corporate goal had merely been to connect people. But that
   was just Step 1. According to the manifesto, Facebook’s “next focus will
   be developing the social infrastructure for community — for supporting us,
   for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for
   inclusion of all.” If it was a nebulous crusade, it was also vast in its
   ambition.

   The last manifesto that Zuckerberg wrote was in 2012, as part of
   Facebook’s application to sell its stock to the public. It explained
   Facebook’s philosophy — what he called “[12]the hacker way” — and sketched
   an unorthodox path for the soon-to-be-public company. “Facebook was not
   originally created to be a company,” he wrote. “It was built to accomplish
   a social mission: to make the world more open and connected.”

   What’s striking about that 2012 letter, read through the prism of 2017, is
   its certainty that a more “open and connected” world is by definition a
   better one. “When I started Facebook, the idea of connecting the world was
   not controversial,” Zuckerberg said now. “The default assumption was that
   the world was incrementally just moving in that direction. So I thought we
   can connect some people and do our part in helping move in that
   direction.” But now, he said, whether it was wise to connect the world was
   “actually a real question.”

   Zuckerberg’s new manifesto never quite accepts blame for any of the global
   ills that have been laid at Facebook’s feet. Yet by the standards of a
   company release, it is remarkable for the way it concedes that the
   company’s chief goal — wiring the globe — is controversial. “There are
   questions about whether we can make a global community that works for
   everyone,” Zuckerberg writes, “and whether the path ahead is to connect
   more or reverse course.” He also confesses misgivings about Facebook’s
   role in the news. “Giving everyone a voice has historically been a very
   positive force for public discourse because it increases the diversity of
   ideas shared,” he writes. “But the past year has also shown it may
   fragment our shared sense of reality.”

   At the time of our second interview, the manifesto was still only a draft,
   and I was surprised by how unsure Zuckerberg seemed about it in person. He
   had almost as many questions for us — about whether we understood what he
   was trying to say, how we thought it would land in the media — as we had
   for him. When I suggested that it might be perceived as an attack on
   Trump, he looked dismayed. He noted several times that he had been
   noodling over these ideas since long before November. A few weeks earlier,
   there was media speculation, fueled by a postelection tour of America by
   Zuckerberg and his wife, that he was laying the groundwork to run against
   Trump in 2020, and in this meeting he took pains to shoot down the rumors.
   When I asked if he had chatted with Obama about the former president’s
   critique of Facebook, Zuckerberg paused for several seconds, nearly to the
   point of awkwardness, before answering that he had.

   Facebook’s spokespeople later called to stress that Obama was only one of
   many people to whom he had spoken. In other words: Don’t read this as a
   partisan anti-Trump manifesto. But if the company pursues the admittedly
   airy aims outlined in “Building Global Community,” the changes will echo
   across media and politics, and some are bound to be considered partisan.
   The risks are especially clear for changes aimed at adding layers of
   journalistic ethics across News Feed, which could transform the public’s
   perception of Facebook, not to mention shake the foundations of its
   business.

   Image

   Mark Zuckerberg at his desk. No one at the company has a private office.

   Credit...

   Spencer Lowell for The New York Times

   The Facebook app, and consequently News Feed, is run by one of
   Zuckerberg’s most influential lieutenants, a 34-year-old named Chris Cox,
   the company’s chief product officer. Ten years ago, Cox dropped out of a
   graduate program in computer science at Stanford to join Facebook. One of
   his first assignments was on the team that created News Feed. Since then,
   he has become an envoy to the media industry. Don Graham, the longtime
   publisher of The Washington Post who was for years a member of Facebook’s
   board, told me that he felt Cox, among Facebook staff, “was at the 99.9th
   percentile of interest in news. He thought it was important to society,
   and he wanted Facebook to get it right.”

   For the typical user, Cox explained when I met him on a morning in October
   at MPK20, News Feed is computing the relative merits of about 2,000
   potential posts in your network every time you open the app. In sorting
   these posts, Facebook does not optimize for any single metric: not clicks
   or reading time or likes. Instead, he said, “what you really want to get
   to is whether somebody, at the end of the day, would say, ‘Hey, my
   experience today was meaningful.’ ” Personalizing News Feed, in other
   words, is a very big “math problem,” incorporating countless metrics in
   extraordinarily complicated ways. Zuckerberg calls it “a modern A.I.
   problem.”

   Last summer, I sat in on two meetings in another glass-walled MPK20
   conference room, in which News Feed’s engineers, designers, user-research
   experts and managers debated several small alterations to how News Feed
   displays certain kinds of posts. The conversations were far from exciting
   — people in jeans on couches looking at PowerPoints, talking quietly about
   numbers — and yet I found them mesmerizing, a demonstration of the
   profound cultural differences between how news companies like The Times
   work and how Facebook does. The first surprise was how slowly things move,
   contrary to the freewheeling culture of “the hacker way.” In one meeting,
   the team spent several minutes discussing the merits of bold text in a
   certain News Feed design. One blessing of making social software is that
   you can gauge any potential change to your product by seeing how your
   users react to it. That is also the curse: At Facebook, virtually every
   change to the app, no matter how small or obviously beneficial, is
   thoroughly tested on different segments of the audience before it’s rolled
   out to everyone.

   The people who work on News Feed aren’t making decisions that turn on
   fuzzy human ideas like ethics, judgment, intuition or seniority. They are
   concerned only with quantifiable outcomes about people’s actions on the
   site. That data, at Facebook, is the only real truth. And it is a
   particular kind of truth: The News Feed team’s ultimate mission is to
   figure out what users want — what they find “meaningful,” to use Cox and
   Zuckerberg’s preferred term — and to give them more of that.

   This ideal runs so deep that the people who make News Feed often have to
   put aside their own notions of what’s best. “One of the things we’ve all
   learned over the years is that our intuition can be wrong a fair amount of
   the time,” John Hegeman, the vice president of product management and a
   News Feed team member, told me. “There are things you don’t expect will
   happen. And we learn a lot from that process: Why didn’t that happen, and
   what might that mean?” But it is precisely this ideal that conflicts with
   attempts to wrangle the feed in the way press critics have called for. The
   whole purpose of editorial guidelines and ethics is often to suppress
   individual instincts in favor of some larger social goal. Facebook finds
   it very hard to suppress anything that its users’ actions say they want.
   In some cases, it has been easier for the company to seek out evidence
   that, in fact, users don’t want these things at all.

   Facebook’s two-year-long battle against “clickbait” is a telling example.
   Early this decade, the internet’s headline writers discovered the power of
   stories that trick you into clicking on them, like those that teasingly
   withhold information from their headlines: “[13]Dustin Hoffman Breaks Down
   Crying Explaining Something That Every Woman Sadly Already Experienced.”
   By the fall of 2013, clickbait had overrun News Feed. Upworthy, a
   progressive activism site co-founded by Pariser, the author of “The Filter
   Bubble,” that relied heavily on teasing headlines, was attracting 90
   million readers a month to its feel-good viral posts.

   If a human editor ran News Feed, she would look at the clickbait scourge
   and make simple, intuitive fixes: Turn down the Upworthy knob. But
   Facebook approaches the feed as an engineering project rather than an
   editorial one. When it makes alterations in the code that powers News
   Feed, it’s often only because it has found some clear signal in its data
   that users are demanding the change. In this sense, clickbait was a
   riddle. In surveys, people kept telling Facebook that they hated teasing
   headlines. But if that was true, why were they clicking on them? Was there
   something Facebook’s algorithm was missing, some signal that would show
   that despite the clicks, clickbait was really sickening users?

   To answer these questions, Cox and his team hired survey panels of more
   than a thousand paid “professional raters” around the world who answer
   questions about how well News Feed is working. Starting in 2013, Facebook
   began adding first dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of data
   points that were meant to teach the artificial-intelligence system that
   runs News Feed how people were reacting to their feeds. Facebook noticed
   that people would sometimes click open a clickbaity story but spend very
   little time on it. In other cases, lots of people would click on a story
   but few would share or Like it. Headlines on stories that people seemed to
   reject often contained a set of signature phrases (“you’ll never believe,”
   “this one trick,” etc.) or they came from a set of repeat-offender
   publishers.

   The more such signals Facebook incorporated into the feed, the more
   clickbait began to drop out of the feed. Since its 2013 peak, Upworthy’s
   traffic has declined; it now averages 17.5 million visitors a month. The
   site has since disavowed clickbait. “We sort of unleashed a monster,”
   Peter Koechley, Upworthy’s co-founder, [14]told a conference in 2015.
   “Sorry for that.”

   Cox suggested that it was not exactly correct to say that Facebook, as a
   company, decided to fight clickbait. What actually happened was that
   Facebook found better ways to listen to users, who were themselves
   rejecting clickbait. “That comes out of good-quality panels and
   measurement systems, rather than an individual decision saying, ‘Hey, I
   really want us to care about clickbait,’ ” he says.

   This approach — looking for signs of user dissatisfaction — could curb
   stories that constitute the most egregious examples of misinformation.
   Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s vice president in charge of News Feed, says that
   Facebook has begun testing an algorithm change that would look at whether
   people share an article after reading it. If few of the people who click
   on a story decide to share it, that might suggest people feel misled by it
   and it would get lower billing in the feed.

   But the solution to the broader misinformation dilemma — the pervasive
   climate of rumor, propaganda and conspiracy theories that Facebook has
   inadvertently incubated — may require something that Facebook has never
   done: ignoring the likes and dislikes of its users. Facebook believes the
   pope-endorses-Trump type of made-up news stories are only a tiny minority
   of pieces that appear in News Feed; they account for a fraction of 1
   percent of the posts, according to Mosseri. The question the company faces
   now is whether the misinformation problem resembles clickbait at all, and
   whether its solutions will align as neatly with Facebook’s worldview.
   Facebook’s entire project, when it comes to news, rests on the assumption
   that people’s individual preferences ultimately coincide with the public
   good, and that if it doesn’t appear that way at first, you’re not delving
   deeply enough into the data. By contrast, decades of social-science
   research shows that most of us simply prefer stuff that feels true to our
   worldview even if it isn’t true at all and that the mining of all those
   preference signals is likely to lead us deeper into bubbles rather than
   out of them.

   After the election, Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post columnist and a
   former public editor of The Times, [15]called on Facebook to hire an
   executive editor who would monitor News Feed with an eye to fact-checking,
   balance and editorial integrity. Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed,
   told me that he wanted Facebook to use its data to create a kind of
   reputational score for online news, as well as explore ways of
   strengthening reporting through monetary partnerships.

   “At some point, if they really want to address this, they have to say,
   ‘This is good information’ and ‘This is bad information,’ ” says Emily
   Bell, the director for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia
   Journalism School. “They have to say, ‘These are the kinds of information
   sources that we want to privilege, and these others are not going to be
   banned from the platform, but they are not going to thrive.’ In other
   words, they have to create a hierarchy, and they’re going to have to
   decide how they’re going to transfer wealth into the publishing market.”

   There aren’t many technical reasons Facebook could not implement such
   plans. The hurdles are institutional and philosophical, and ultimately
   financial too. Late last year, [16]Facebook outlined a modest effort to
   curb misinformation. News Feed would now carry warning labels: If a friend
   shares a viral story that has been flagged and shot down by one of
   Facebook’s fact-checking partners (including Snopes and PolitiFact),
   you’ll be cautioned that the piece has been “disputed.” But even that
   slight change has been met with fury on the right, with Breitbart and The
   Daily Caller fuming that Facebook had teamed up with liberal hacks
   motivated by partisanship. If Facebook were to take more significant
   action, like hiring human editors, creating a reputational system or
   paying journalists, the company would instantly become something it has
   long resisted: a media company rather than a neutral tech platform.

   In many ways, the worry over how Facebook changes the news is really a
   manifestation of a grander problem with News Feed, which is simply
   dominance itself. News Feed’s aggressive personalization wouldn’t be much
   of an issue if it weren’t crowding out every other source. “To some degree
   I feel like the Pottery Barn Rule applies,” says Pariser, the Upworthy
   chief executive. “They play a critical role in our information circulatory
   system, and so — lucky them — all of the problems therein are
   significantly on their shoulders.”

   During our first meeting in January, I posed this question to Zuckerberg:
   “When you see various problems in the media, do you say to yourself, ‘I
   run Facebook, I can solve that?’ ”

   “Um,” he started, and then paused, weighing his words as carefully as
   American presidents once did. “Not usually.” He argued that some of
   Facebook’s critics’ proposed fixes for news on the service, such as hiring
   editors, were impractical due to Facebook’s scale and global diversity.
   Personalization, he said, remained a central tenet. “It really gets back
   to, like, what do people want at a deep level,” he said. “There’s this
   oversimplified narrative that a company can get very successful by just
   scratching a very superficial itch, and I don’t really think that’s right
   over the long term.”

   Yet by our second meeting, Zuckerberg’s position seemed to have evolved.
   Facebook had by then announced plans for the Facebook Journalism Project,
   in which the company would collaborate with news companies on new
   products. Facebook also created a project to promote “news literacy” among
   its users, and it hired the former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown to
   manage the partnership between it and news companies. Zuckerberg’s tone
   toward critics of Facebook’s approach to news had also grown far more
   conciliatory. “I think it’s really important to get to the core of the
   actual problem,” he said. “I also really think that the core social thing
   that needs to happen is that a common understanding needs to exist. And
   misinformation I view as one of the things that can possibly erode common
   understanding. But sensationalism and polarization and other things, I
   actually think, are probably even stronger and more prolific effects. And
   we have to work on all these things. I think we need to listen to all the
   feedback on this.”

   Still, in both our conversation and his new manifesto, Zuckerberg remained
   preoccupied with the kind of problems that could be solved by the kind of
   hyperconnectivity he believed in, not the ones caused by it. “There’s a
   social infrastructure that needs to get built for modern problems in order
   for humanity to get to the next level,” he said. “Having more people
   oriented not just toward short-term things but toward building the
   long-term social infrastructure that needs to get built across all these
   things in order to enable people to come together is going to be a really
   important thing over the next decades.” By way of example, he pointed to
   Safety Check, Facebook’s system for letting people tell their friends that
   they’ve survived some kind of dangerous event, like a natural disaster or
   terrorist attack.

   “We’re getting to a point where the biggest opportunities I think in the
   world ... problems like preventing pandemics from spreading or ending
   terrorism, all these things, they require a level of coordination and
   connection that I don’t think can only be solved by the current systems
   that we have,” Zuckerberg told me. What’s needed, he argues, is some
   global superstructure to advance humanity.

   This is not an especially controversial idea; Zuckerberg is arguing for a
   kind of digital-era version of the global institution-building that the
   Western world engaged in after World War II. But because he is a chief
   executive and not an elected president, there is something frightening
   about his project. He is positioning Facebook — and, considering that he
   commands absolute voting control of the company, he is positioning himself
   — as a critical enabler of the next generation of human society. A minor
   problem with his mission is that it drips with megalomania, albeit of a
   particularly sincere sort. With his wife, Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg has
   pledged to give away nearly all of his wealth to a variety of charitable
   causes, including a long-term medical-research project to cure all
   disease. His desire to take on global social problems through digital
   connectivity, and specifically through Facebook, feels like part of the
   same impulse.

   Yet Zuckerberg is often blasé about the messiness of the transition
   between the world we’re in and the one he wants to create through
   software. Building new “social infrastructure” usually involves tearing
   older infrastructure down. If you manage the demolition poorly, you might
   undermine what comes next. In the case of the shattering media landscape,
   Zuckerberg seems finally to have at least noticed this problem and may yet
   come up with fixes for it. But in the meantime, Facebook rushes headlong
   into murky new areas, uncovering new dystopian possibilities at every
   turn.

   A few months after I spoke with Zuckerberg, Facebook held its annual
   developer conference in San Jose, Calif. At last year’s show, Zuckerberg
   introduced an expanded version of Facebook’s live streaming service which
   had been promised to revolutionize how we communicate. In the year since,
   Live had generated iconic scenes of protest, but it was also used
   to [17]broadcast a terrorist attack in Munich and at least [18]one
   suicide. Hours before Zuckerberg’s appearance at the conference, police
   announced that a Cleveland man who had killed a stranger and posted a
   video on Facebook had shot himself after a manhunt.

   But as he [19]took the stage in San Jose, Zuckerberg was ebullient. He
   started with a few dad jokes and threatened to read his long manifesto on
   stage. For a brief moment, there was a shift in tone: Statesman Zuck. “In
   all seriousness, this is an important time to work on building community,”
   he said. He offered Facebook’s condolences to the victim in Cleveland; the
   incident, he said, reminded Facebook that “we have a lot more to do.”

   Just as quickly, though, Zuckerberg then pivoted to Facebook’s next
   marvel, a system for digitally augmenting your pictures and videos. The
   technical term for this is “augmented reality.” The name bursts with
   dystopian possibilities — fake news on video rather than just text — but
   Zuckerberg never mentioned them. The statesman had left the stage; before
   us stood an engineer.