London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Thursday, Oct 02, 2025

Twitter And Facebook's Race To The Bottom

The two companies had a bad run in the 2010s. It was their own fault.

It’s been a rough decade for Facebook and Twitter. The two entered the 2010s with so much promise. On Twitter, you could talk to just about anyone. On Facebook, you could treat yourself to endless amusement, scrolling through photos and statuses your friends probably should not have posted.

Then, all hell broke loose. Social media was no longer fun. It was toxic. And it got this way for a reason.

Ultimately, Facebook and Twitter descended into chaos by their own doing. Over the course of 10 years, they made a series of misguided product decisions that transformed them from online amusement parks into hellscapes. Here’s how it happened.

2010

Time magazine named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg its Person of the Year in 2010, in what was likely the apex of social media’s popularity. The site, back then, had a mere 550 million users. “It started out as a lark, a diversion, but it has turned into something real, something that has changed the way human beings relate to one another on a species-wide scale,” the Time article said.

Time approached Zuckerberg with an optimistic tone -even reverence -aware of his accomplishments and power. Throughout the profile, however, there was a sense of uncertainty as to where that power would lead.

As Time was interviewing Zuckerberg, then-FBI director Robert Mueller walked into the room. A Facebook spokesperson tried to put that off record, but the reporter wouldn’t have it. “They shook hands and chatted about nothing for a couple of minutes, and then Mueller left,” the Time profile said. “There was a giddy silence while everybody just looked at one another as if to say, What the hell just happened?”

Facebook looked like this at the time:

The social network’s News Feed was up and running, but Facebook was primarily a directory where people could share their lives with friends and families. Public content -from celebrities, news sites, and politicians -was barely present.

Facebook had grand designs. It wanted third-party developers to build applications, and it wanted to entrench itself more deeply into services around the web. To do this, it loosened restrictions on how much data developers could hold onto. “We’ve had this policy where you can’t store and cache any data for more than 24 hours, and we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to get rid of that policy,” Zuckerberg said at Facebook’s 2010 F8 developer conference. According to a CNET report, the audience cheered.

Twitter, meanwhile, looked like this:

Twitter cofounder and then-CEO Evan Williams was sending updates about his plans to watch Apple CEO Steve Jobs present at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. He was also tweeting about a new ride-hailing service called “Ubercab.” Quite a day.

2011

In 2011, Facebook introduced the Subscribe button, a new feature meant to make the service bigger and more influential. The button “lets you hear from interesting people you're not friends with -like journalists, artists and political figures,” Facebook said in its announcement. “Just click the button to get their public updates right in your News Feed.”

The Subscribe button was addictive, both for Facebook’s users and for public figures. But by creating the Subscribe button, Facebook sacrificed some of its friends-and-family feel for influence and size.

Twitter in 2011 introduced photo sharing, taking a major step toward becoming a more visual, less text-heavy network. “140 characters, now worth 1,000 words,” then-executive chair Jack Dorsey wrote.

2012

Facebook rolled into 2012 with more than 800 million users. It went public that May, increasing the pressure to grow its user base and revenue each quarter. “Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries,” Zuckerberg wrote in the company’s IPO filing.

Twitter, meanwhile, was the defining political platform of the 2012 US presidential election. A post-victory tweet with a picture of Barack and Michelle Obama became the platform’s most retweeted post ever.

Eight days after the election, Facebook tried to catch up. It introduced a mobile share button -a retweet clone -that would add speed to its service, making it more attractive for news organizations and politicians.

2013

With 230 million users, Twitter went public in 2013, increasing the pressure to grow its user base and revenue.

Facebook spent 2013 copying more Twitter features. It added hashtags in March and a trending column in August. The signal was clear: Facebook badly wanted more public, real-time content.

Traditional news publishers answered Facebook’s call, working hard to build operations that would translate their work from something people would pay for into something they would click. Nontraditional publishers crashed the party as well, including digital-only news and entertainment sites (BuzzFeed included), along with made-for-Facebook fake news.

“I was seeing those sorts of sites all over the place with large followings and they were getting good traffic and I just thought to myself, Well I could do that,” Jestin Coler, who set up the fake news site National Review in 2013, told BuzzFeed News.

Facebook’s decision to increase public content and add a mobile share button ignited fake news on its service. People spread all manner of lies without much thought -the share button removed almost all hesitation from the act of sharing -as long as those lies confirmed their worldview.

2014

Twitter began experimenting with a “retweet with comment” feature -now known as the quote tweet -in 2014. The feature would introduce a new practice to the service: dunking. This would add a level of public viciousness to Twitter. “The biggest problem is the quote retweet,” former Twitter product head Jason Goldman told BuzzFeed News earlier this year. “It’s the dunk mechanism.”

In 2014, Twitter users showed a new capacity to do harm using the service’s tools. That year, Gamergate erupted. Gamergate was a harassment campaign against women in the game industry, and it weaponized the retweet button. Chris Wetherell, the project lead on the retweet button project back in 2009, watched with horror as Gamergate unfolded, understanding the damage his creation had wrought. “Ask any of the people who were targets at that time, retweeting helped them get a false picture of a person out there faster than they could respond,” he told BuzzFeed News. “We didn't build a defense for that. We only built an offensive conduit.”

Facebook had an eventful year in 2014 too. It revealed it had manipulated users’ emotions via a News Feed experiment, it bought the virtual reality startup Oculus for $2 billion and the messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion. Facebook was now massive -with more than a billion users on mobile alone -and it wasn’t dedicating sufficient resources to monitor its products.


2015

Facebook’s desire for public content caused its service to flood with posts from public sources, making normal sharing between friends and family feel intimidating. By 2015, people were sharing fewer original posts on Facebook, leaving a void that fake and sensationalized news purveyors happily filled. That year, Facebook knew it had a problem on its hands, and pledged to show fewer hoaxes.

In 2015, Ted Cruz’s US presidential campaign began working with the data firm Cambridge Analytica to target messaging to voters. Cambridge Analytica, according to a Guardian report that year, was using “psychographic profiles” of US citizens built with Facebook data that researcher Aleksandr Kogan collected and kept under the site’s loose developer policies.

Twitter -focused on making money and growing its user base to please the public markets -largely ignored a festering harassment problem that worsened after Gamergate. “We suck at dealing with abuse,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said in early 2015, in a rare moment of self-reflection. Costolo stepped down, leaving the mess to Dorsey, who returned as Twitter’s CEO.


2016

Twitter introduced an algorithm to its feed in 2016, and the trolls went wild. One summer evening, a mob sparked by Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos acted so brutally that their target, Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones, quit the service. Twitter had become a honeypot for assholes.

Facebook, meanwhile, became the defining platform for the US presidential election in 2016, but perhaps not for the reasons it hoped. The top fake news stories went more viral on Facebook than real news, hyperpartisan pages spread misleading information about the candidates, and teens in Macedonia ran scores of pro-Trump, fake news websites to cash in on the frenzy.

A Kremlin-linked troll farm, the Internet Research Agency, seeded posts on Facebook and Twitter meant to sow discord and tear American society apart.

And after Ted Cruz pulled out of the race, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, which would go on to victory, began working with Cambridge Analytica.


2017

After nearing saturation in the US market, Facebook had for years worked hard to expand in international markets. The company succeeded, reaching 2 billion monthly users by mid-2017, but it was woefully unprepared to keep its expansion safe. In 2017, lawmakers in Myanmar posted hate speech and lies about the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority. For these lawmakers, Facebook became a key tool in a violent campaign that displaced 700,000 Rohingya in what the UN called a genocide.

At Twitter, a contractor on their last day of work deactivated President Trump’s account.


2018

In March 2018, the New York Times and the Guardian published damning stories revealing the full extent of Cambridge Analytica’s work on the 2016 election. Kogan gave the firm data on up to 87 million Facebook users, yet only 270,000 people consented to hand their data over. The data identified people’s personality traits, helping tailor messaging based on whether they were agreeable, for instance, or religious. Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower, declared: “I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool.” A month later, Zuckerberg was explaining himself on Capitol Hill.

Having been called out and dragged before Congress for its failings, Facebook began to patch up some of the vulnerabilities in its core service. But it still struggled to contain the damage being done in its satellite apps. Like the retweet and share, WhatsApp had a “forward” button that allowed news, memes, and rumors to spread rapidly, passed on without thought or hesitation. In July 2018, a mob in the Rainpada village in India beat five strangers to death after viewing untraceable videos on WhatsApp that warned -baselessly -of child abductors. Facebook would limit message forwards in 2019.

Twitter spent a good chunk of 2018 defending its decision not to ban the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, giving the impression that it was still unsure where to draw the line on its speech rules. Then, in September, after Apple banned him, Twitter followed suit.


2019

As the end of the decade neared, Facebook and Twitter were scrambling to clean up their services. Twitter has banned political ads ahead of the election, and Facebook is considering restrictions of its own. Twitter said it will label politicians’ tweets when they break its rules, and Facebook is trying to reemphasize friends-and-family content.

Over a decade, the two services prioritized growth and influence over safety, creating a mess they’ll spend the next decade cleaning up. They’ve reached their goals, achieving great wealth and power as a result, but at a cost to society that won’t be fully calculable for some years to come.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
Switzerland and U.S. Issue Joint Assurance Against Currency Manipulation
Electronic Arts to Be Taken Private in Historic $55 Billion Buyout
Thomas Jacob Sanford Named as Suspect in Deadly Michigan Church Shooting and Arson
Russian Research Vessel 'Yantar' Tracked Mapping Europe’s Subsea Cables, Raising Security Alarms
New York Man Arrested After On-Air Confession to 2017 Parents’ Murders
U.S. Defense Chief Orders Sudden Summit of Hundreds of Generals and Admirals
Global Cruise Industry Posts Dramatic Comeback with 34.6 Million Passengers in 2024
Trump Claims FBI Planted 274 Agents at Capitol Riot, Citing Unverified Reports
India: Internet Suspended in Bareilly Amid Communal Clashes Between Muslims and Hindus
Supreme Court Extends Freeze on Nearly $5 Billion in U.S. Foreign Aid at Trump’s Request
Archaeologists Recover Statues and Temples from 2,000-Year-Old Sunken City off Alexandria
China Deploys 2,000 Workers to Spain to Build Major EV Battery Factory, Raising European Dependence
Speed Takes Over: How Drive-Through Coffee Chains Are Rewriting U.S. Coffee Culture
U.S. Demands Brussels Scrutinize Digital Rules to Prevent Bias Against American Tech
Ringo Starr Champions Enduring Beatles Legacy While Debuting Las Vegas Art Show
Private Equity’s Fundraising Surge Triggers Concern of European Market Shake-Out
Colombian President Petro Vows to Mobilize Volunteers for Gaza and Joins List of Fighters
FBI Removes Agents Who Kneeled at 2020 Protest, Citing Breach of Professional Conduct
Trump Alleges ‘Triple Sabotage’ at United Nations After Escalator and Teleprompter Failures
Shock in France: 5 Years in Prison for Former President Nicolas Sarkozy
Tokyo’s Jimbōchō Named World’s Coolest Neighbourhood for 2025
European Officials Fear Trump May Shift Blame for Ukraine War onto EU
BNP Paribas Abandons Ban on 'Controversial Weapons' Financing Amid Europe’s Defence Push
Typhoon Ragasa Leaves Trail of Destruction Across East Asia Before Making Landfall in China
The Personality Rights Challenge in India’s AI Era
Big Banks Rebuild in Hong Kong as Deal Volume Surges
Italy Considers Freezing Retirement Age at 67 to Avert Scheduled Hike
Italian City to Impose Tax on Visiting Dogs Starting in 2026
Arnault Denounces Proposed Wealth Tax as Threat to French Economy
Study Finds No Safe Level of Alcohol for Dementia Risk
Denmark Investigates Drone Incursion, Does Not Rule Out Russian Involvement
Lilly CEO Warns UK Is ‘Worst Country in Europe’ for Drug Prices, Pulls Back Investment
Nigel Farage Emerges as Central Force in British Politics with Reform UK Surge
Disney Reinstates ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ after Six-Day Suspension over Charlie Kirk Comments
U.S. Prosecutors Move to Break Up Google’s Advertising Monopoly
Nvidia Pledges Up to $100 Billion Investment in OpenAI to Power Massive AI Data Center Build-Out
U.S. Signals ‘Large and Forceful’ Support for Argentina Amid Market Turmoil
Nvidia and Abu Dhabi’s TII Launch First AI-&-Robotics Lab in the Middle East
Vietnam Faces Up to $25 Billion Export Loss as U.S. Tariffs Bite
Europe Signals Stronger Support for Taiwan at Major Taipei Defence Show
Indonesia Court Upholds Military Law Amid Concerns Over Expanded Civilian Role
Larry Ellison, Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch Join Trump-Backed Bid to Take Over TikTok
Trump and Musk Reunite Publicly for First Time Since Fallout at Kirk Memorial
Vietnam Closes 86 Million Untouched Bank Accounts Over Biometric ID Rules
×