Why Facebook is spiraling - by Casey Newton - Platformer

And so once again, even when the details are wrong, I think the scrutiny is broadly right. How does Facebook affect our mental health? How does it affect our politics? What does it know about itself that it has so far declined to share?

These strike me as the right questions to ask — and, indeed, they’re probably the questions I have returned to most often in four years of writing this column. They also help us to understand what is ultimately the scandal here. It’s the sense that Facebook is worse for us than it will admit; that it has data to back it up; and that it has hidden that data from the public.

Maybe that proposition is entirely false. But at this point Facebook has lost the benefit of the doubt. If it is indeed good for the world, the company has to do a better job proving it.

Forgive the extended quote here, but I think it’s worth reading. I know that you’d go broke believing every “Facebook is doomed” headline from the past decade, but it’s impossible to argue Facebook has had a good press month.

On a personal level, I was in one of the firs schools to get Facebook way back in 2004 and it was the most fun thing on the internet at the time. I met my wife there (we were the only 2 people at our school to have The Lucksmiths listed as one of our favorite bands), so it will always have a special place for me, but it’s crazy to see how much things have changed since then.