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AI Ruined Social Media A Long Time Ago
But we still must embrace what comes next
Seventeen years ago, Facebook launched News Feed. It marked the most important event in the company’s history: a simple product change where users on the platform would start seeing all activity from friends in their network. Powered by AI, this tidal wave of new content came from an algorithm that drastically increased the average time on site. Users hated it, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg stuck to his guns.
A year later, the company released profile pages for businesses and the “Like” button instantly became a direct path to News Feeds all around the world. A faster, cooler way to reach potential customers. More immediate than email and destined to change digital marketing forever. Businesses everywhere begged for new “fans” as it became social currency — a vanity metric that meant everything and nothing at the same time. Grow your fanbase. Grow your feed presence. Grow your sales. Behind the scenes, of course, existed an AI system built by the smartest people in the world with one mission: increase engagement at all costs.
These two milestones, along with the announcement of Facebook Ads in 2007, ultimately enabled the company to become an advertising behemoth and build a targeting machine that had never existed on the Internet. Heavily automated, extremely…
