Facebook Dead

Divisive politics and fake news are hurting the country and could kill the world’s biggest social media platform

- Kevin Maney 

IMAGINE GOING on Facebook and finding no political posts—just your friends and their updates. It would feel like pulling on clean underwear after wearing a single pair for a week on a desert hike.

Fake news? That’s only the start of the tempest about to roll through Facebook headquarters. The site is turning into a septic tank of polluted politics. It’s becoming a party you want to leave because everybody got drunk and obnoxious. No new social network is going to beat Facebook by copying Facebook, but we might get fed up with all the politics and fake crap on Facebook and turn to something refreshingly different. Right there you can see the leak in Facebook’s tire: the left glove that drops and leaves an opening for a rival to punch it in the face.

“There’s a real risk this is doing great harm to the brand,” I was told by a Facebook insider who has been part of recent conversations at the top of that behemoth but asked not to be identified because the person didn’t want to alienate the company. This source said the election aftermath might be Facebook’s “Tylenol moment”—a reference to the 1982 poisoning deaths of people who ingested Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. That crisis nearly crippled its maker, medical giant Johnson & Johnson.

Think back just a couple of years, before the 2016 election cycle and before Facebook set itself up as the world’s newswire. Facebook grew to a billion users by being a social network. It’s where you found old friends and kept up with family. I just looked back at my 2014 Facebook timeline. Almost zero politics! And that’s how most people liked it. Many users back then even beseeched friends to avoid political posts, or muted the violators if they persisted. In real life, most of us don’t want to argue politics with our friends and family, so why would we want to do it online?