The Psychology of Building Harmful Things

In September and October 2021, the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles based on tens of thousands of internal Facebook documents provided by a former employee named Frances Haugen. Among other things, the documents showed that Facebook’s own researchers had found that Instagram worsened body image issues and increased suicidal ideation in teenage girls, and that the company had known this for years while publicly denying that its platforms caused harm. The documents also showed that Facebook’s algorithms systematically promoted outrage and divisive content because it generated more engagement, and that internal teams had identified this as a serious problem without being able to change it. None of this is surprising in retrospect. What is surprising is how ordinary the behavior looks when you read the documents: working groups, slide decks, and recommendations sent to committees. The harm was not produced by villains. It was produced by an organization operating in ways…