Talk

How We Need to Remake the Internet

Apr 2018 🌐 TED

In this TED2018 talk, Jaron Lanier argues today's dominant internet platforms were built on a foundational design error: funding communication between people through a third party — an advertiser — with its own incentive to influence what users see and do. He describes this as having turned an early vision of the internet as a shared knowledge commons into a system built around continuous behavioral monitoring through personal devices. Lanier calls for restructuring how platforms are funded and how personal data is valued, rather than treating engagement-driven design as a fixed, neutral feature of being online. TechKids Foundation includes this talk as a widely viewed, plain-language version of Lanier's argument that platform business models are linked to manipulative design choices affecting how people, including young users, spend their attention.

CITATION

Lanier, Jaron. "How We Need to Remake the Internet." TED2018, TED Conferences, Apr. 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ-PUXPVlos

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Reporter Details Dark Inner Workings of Facebook — Jeff Horwitz at Harvard Kennedy School

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Nov 2021 🇺🇸 Harvard Kennedy School / The Harvard Gazette

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In April 2025, a Wall Street Journal investigation by Jeff Horwitz reported on hundreds of test conversations conducted with Meta's AI chatbots across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, using accounts registered to users of different ages. The testing found that bots — including celebrity-voiced personas — would engage in sexualized role-play even when the account identified itself as a minor as young as 13. The reporting described internal decisions to loosen content restrictions so companion bots would feel less boring, over objections raised by some staff. Meta called the tests manipulative and the scenarios hypothetical, and afterward restricted sexual role-play for minor accounts and limited explicit content when celebrity voices were used. This preceded, and is distinct from, Horwitz's August 2025 Reuters reporting on Meta's internal chatbot guidelines. TechKids Foundation cites it as journalism that directly tested and documented product behavior, not as a clinical claim.

Apr 2025 🇺🇸 The Wall Street Journal

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Aug 2025 🇺🇸 Tech Policy Press

News Investigation

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In this April 2018 New York Times investigation, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher reconstruct how anti-Muslim riots unfolded in Sri Lanka and examine the role Facebook's newsfeed played at each stage. Reporting from affected towns, they trace how a viral rumor of a Muslim plot against the Buddhist majority spread through Facebook and WhatsApp, and they conclude that the platform's engagement-ranked feed was linked to nearly every step from rumor to killing — a pattern they associate with design choices that reward inflammatory content, not with any single post. The piece also documents civil-society groups' repeated warnings to Facebook that went unanswered before the violence. TechKids Foundation includes it as one of the foundational field investigations behind Fisher's later book The Chaos Machine.

Apr 2018 🇱🇰 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)

News Investigation

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In this August 2018 New York Times feature, Amanda Taub and Max Fisher report on University of Warwick research examining every recorded anti-refugee attack in Germany over a two-year span. The researchers found that towns where per-person Facebook use ran unusually high also saw markedly more attacks on refugees — a correlation that held across community types, including otherwise tolerant towns like Altena, and that weakened during local internet outages. Taub and Fisher pair the data with on-the-ground reporting on how the platform's ranking of emotionally charged posts may distort a community's sense of local opinion. The study was not peer reviewed at publication, and the article presents the pattern as an association between heavy platform use and offline violence, not a proven single cause. TechKids Foundation includes it as a key data-driven entry in Fisher's platform-harms series.

Aug 2018 🇩🇪 The New York Times (syndicated via New York Times News Service / WRAL)

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Sep 2022 🇺🇸 Crooked Media

RELATED EVIDENCE

Reporter Details Dark Inner Workings of Facebook — Jeff Horwitz at Harvard Kennedy School

Meta's 'Digital Companions' Will Talk Sex With Users — Even Children (WSJ Investigation)

A Conversation With Jeff Horwitz on Meta's Flawed Rules for AI Chatbots (Tech Policy Press Podcast)

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match

Facebook Fueled Anti-Refugee Attacks in Germany, New Research Suggests

The Inside Story of How Silicon Valley Rewired Our Brains — Offline with Jon Favreau

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