In 2025, we find ourselves hurtling toward fascism, fueled by a relentless surge of disinformation that barely carried our current president to victory. In the midst of this chaos, Facebook is attempting to resurrect the seemingly simpler days of its platform with a revamped Friends feed that focuses solely on the people you genuinely care about. However, this idea feels utterly ridiculous. The announcement titled “Bringing the Magic of Friends Back to Facebook” is positioned by the company as a return to the “original” Facebook experience.
Yet, if you truly believe that Facebook is anything other than a melting pot of algorithmically-generated content designed to provoke outrage, mislead users, and escalate tensions, then it’s hard to know how to convince you otherwise. Now is supposedly the ideal time to remove all the artificially produced content, enabling users to engage solely with their friends’ updates. However, this attempt to clean up the platform rings hollow coming after the damage has already been done. A more effective solution is glaringly obvious: Facebook should hire more content moderators, compensating them fairly.
The company needs to commit to actively filtering out disinformation and hate speech while embracing diversity and accountability. But does Facebook take this responsibility seriously? Perhaps they attempt to, but the results speak for themselves. Despite my disdain for Facebook, I find myself using it for work.
It’s frustrating to witness former classmates reveal their inner ugliness, and my feelings toward Facebook mirror my sentiments about Uber—a platform that has tried to buy its way into societal acceptance. As for Threads, another Meta offering, while it’s a response to Twitter’s controversies, it still falls short given its ownership. Facebook’s own blog post admits, “The magic of friends has fallen away.” Well, of course, it has; the company itself is to blame.