I write stories on media, human and machines. And I pay to publish them using the Ghost blogging platform.

Facebook is free to use. Twitter is free of charge. Instagram does not charge any money. TikTok does not have any membership fees.

Operating these services cost millions of dollar a month. They make money by selling detailed targeting of their users to advertisers.

Bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do anything you want. It’s a bad, bad state of affairs. And we compound the problem. We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short term signals: Hearts, likes, thumbs up.

And we conflate that with value and we conflate it with truth, and instead what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that’s short term and that leaves you even more, and admit it, vacant and empty before you did it. Because it forces you into this vicious cycle about what’s the next thing I need to do, because I need it back. And think about that compounded by two billion people.

Chamath Palihapitiya former vice president of user growth at Facebook.

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/magnus