“If you’d come to me in 2012, when the last presidential election was raging and we were cooking up ever more complicated ways to monetize Facebook data, and told me that Russian agents in the Kremlin’s employ would be buying Facebook ads to subvert American democracy, I’d have asked where your tin-foil hat was.” Back then, most of us in the tech community would’ve agreed with Antonio García Martínez, who was managing Facebook’s ad targeting business. “And yet”, as Alexis Madrigal explains in The Atlantic, “now we live in that otherworldly political reality.” (Reality bytes). In this excellent overview of how we got here, Madrigal traces What Facebook Did to American Democracy (and why it was so hard to see it coming).

+ “I lay awake at night thinking about all the things we built in the early days and what we could have done to avoid the product being used this way.” In Vanity Fair Nick Bilton talks to some Facebook employees about the monster they’ve created. Oh My God, What Have I Done? (It’s not just Facebook. Plenty of people who were around during the early days of tech ask themselves that question.)

+ In an interview with Axios, Sheryl Sandberg makes the case that Facebook is a platform, not a media company. “At our heart we’re a tech company… we don’t hire journalists.” They may not hire journalists, but their employees and algorithms are the most powerful and influential set of editors the news world has ever known (present company excepted…)

+ Where countries (especially one in particular) have failed to organize relief efforts, tech companies have moved in to provide connectivity and power in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Are giant tech companies essentially the new nation states?

+ NYT: Tech giants, once seen as saviors, are now viewed as threats.