Facebook was once, believe it or not, cool.

But a lot has changed since the early days of the News Feed, when it was full of status updates and photos from friends. Facebook has gotten crowded with brands and pages vying for eyeballs. It has become a place where people, especially teenagers and young adults, don’t feel as comfortable sharing their lives. 

Now, after spending the past four years trying to fix the News Feed by making it more about friends and family, Facebook is going in the other direction: toward showing you more entertaining content from people you don’t know. This new “Discovery Engine” push is all about becoming more like TikTok, which has captured the attention of the young generation Facebook so desperately wants to win back.

The result is an “updated vision for how the Facebook app is going to respond to the next generation of people who are going to use it,” says Tom Alison, the head of the Facebook app at Meta, in what marks his first in-depth podcast interview since he assumed the role in July 2021.

We examine the past, present, and future of Facebook’s Feed for our fifth episode of the new season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential tech companies of our time. This season, Recode and The Verge have teamed up over the course of seven episodes to tell the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming Meta, featuring interviews with current and former executives.

This episode also features commentary from Nick Clegg, Meta’s top policy executive, about the implications of the company taking more control over what billions of users see every day in their Facebook and Instagram feeds. 

“In a strange kind of way in the future, we’re going to be doing what we have been alleged to do for a long time,” said Clegg. “If you listen to the [former Facebook employee and whistleblower] Frances Haugen kind of narrative … it’s oh my gosh, they’re just spoon-feeding people hate speech. … Of course it was nonsense … because the vast majority of content that people saw on Facebook was driven, of course, by our systems, but also by their own choices, who their friends are, which groups they’re part of, what content they engage with, and so on.” 

But that is changing with the new Discovery Engine strategy. To make Facebook and Instagram more like TikTok, Meta will use AI to serve users more content from strangers. What will this push mean for the future of Facebook and how we use it?

Listen to the fifth episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption, and catch the first four episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

At one point in time, Facebook’s relationship with politicians was relatively uncontroversial.

But after the 2016 US elections, everything changed.

Early in the campaign, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump tested the limits of Facebook’s rules against hateful speech, at the same time that the company became a vehicle of political exploitation by foreign actors.

Facebook’s first test: dealing with a 2015 Facebook post from Trump calling for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the US. While some inside the company saw a strong argument that Trump’s comments violated Facebook’s rules against religious hate speech, the company decided to keep the post up. Until then, most Facebook employees had never before grappled with the possibility that their platform could be used to stoke such division by a political candidate for the highest position of office.

“What do you do when the leading candidate for president posts an attack … on [one of the] the biggest religion[s] in the world?” former Facebook employee and Democratic lobbyist Crystal Patterson told us.

And it wasn’t just national politicians Facebook had to worry about, but foreign adversaries, too. Despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s initial post-election comments dismissing the “pretty crazy idea” that fake news on the platform could have influenced the elections, it soon became clear that propaganda from Russian Facebook accounts had reached millions of American voters — causing an unprecedented backlash and forcing the company to reckon with its culpability in influencing global politics.

Over time, Zuckerberg would acknowledge Facebook’s role as what he called “the Fifth Estate” — an entity as powerful as the government and media in shaping the public agenda — while at the same time trying to minimize the company’s role dictating the acceptable terms of political speech.

To offload the burden of political responsibility going forward, Facebook formed the Oversight Board in 2018, a Supreme Court-like body it set up to weigh in on controversial content decisions — including how to deal with Trump’s account. But the board is new, and we’re still learning how much power it has over Facebook. How much responsibility does Facebook still have to dictate the terms of its own platform? And can the board go far enough to change the social media platform’s underlying engine: its recommendation algorithms? 

We explore these questions about Facebook’s role in moderating political speech in our fourth episode of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential tech companies of our time. This season, Recode and The Verge have teamed up over the course of seven episodes to tell the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming Meta, featuring interviews with current and former executives.

Listen to the fourth episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/Meta Disruption, and catch the first two episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Remember when Facebook’s News Feed was chock full of apps like Zynga’s FarmVille? That era, in the early 2010s, was Mark Zuckerberg’s first big attempt at making Facebook much bigger than just a social network and more like a platform for developers akin to Windows.

It was a formative period for the internet, when mobile phones and the app economy were just taking off. For Facebook, it was the “Move Fast and Break Things” era — an early motto of the company — when it grew to hundreds of millions of users and made decisions that still haunt it to this day. What did Zuckerberg get right in this period that set Facebook up for dominance, and what did he get wrong along the way?

That’s a tease of what you can expect in the second episode of the new season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential tech companies of our time. This season, Recode and The Verge have teamed up over the course of seven episodes to tell the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming Meta, featuring interviews with current and former executives.

Our first episode, on the creation of the News Feed, told the story of Zuckerberg’s original vision for social media. Episode two looks at the consequences of pursuing that vision at full speed. We explain how the era that brought us FarmVille and “Log in with Facebook” would lead the company into one of its biggest scandals: Cambridge Analytica.

The second episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/Meta Disruption is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Mark Zuckerberg wants a fresh start. He’s betting his company’s future on the metaverse, imagining an AR glasses-powered world that seems lifted from the pages of science fiction. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still here in the present, grappling with Facebook and Meta’s powerful influence over the real world. 

We explore the original source of that influence in the inaugural episode of the new season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media Podcast Network’s award-winning narrative podcast series about the most influential tech companies of our time. This season, Recode and The Verge team up over the course of seven episodes to tell the story of Facebook’s journey to becoming Meta, featuring interviews with current and former executives.

To begin, we go back nearly two decades to Zuckerberg’s first big bet: the creation of the News Feed. It’s a controversial origin story that shows the young founder’s initial vision for connecting people at scale, regardless of the consequences. In this episode, we talked to Ruchi Sanghvi, one of Facebook’s first engineers, who helped build the News Feed, which at launch was disliked enough to spark widespread protest from users. “It was the first time we actually got a security guard to stand outside the doors of the Facebook offices,” she says.

We examine how, despite the initial blowback, the introduction of the News Feed paved the way for Facebook to become the social media juggernaut it is today. It’s perhaps Facebook’s most impactful invention and is now undergoing a massive evolution — a story we’ll tackle later in the season.

The first episode of Land of the Giants: The Facebook / Meta Disruption is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows.