“Ovadya saw early what many — including lawmakers, journalists, and Big Tech CEOs — wouldn’t grasp until months later: Our platformed and algorithmically optimized world is vulnerable — to propaganda, to misinformation, to dark targeted advertising from foreign governments — so much so that it threatens to undermine a cornerstone of human discourse: the credibility of fact. But it’s what he sees coming next that will really scare the shit out of you.” Buzzfeed’s Charlie Warzel on why the internet-powered information crisis that already dominates our discourse is just getting started: He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He’s Worried About An Information Apocalypse. Here’s one example of what AI makes possible: “Imagine … phishing messages that aren’t just a confusing link you might click, but a personalized message with context. ‘Not just an email, but an email from a friend that you’ve been anxiously waiting for for a while … And because it would be so easy to create things that are fake you’d become overwhelmed. If every bit of spam you receive looked identical to emails from real people you knew, each one with its own motivation trying to convince you of something, you’d just end up saying, ‘okay, I’m going to ignore my inbox.'” (And therein lies one of the Internet’s saddest ironies. What started out as a tool that empowered us with access to unfiltered information may ultimately be an uncontrollable spigot that floods us with so much data that we no longer know what to believe.)

+ “The stories varied, but most people told the same basic tale: of a company, and a CEO, whose techno-optimism has been crushed as they’ve learned the myriad ways their platform can be used for ill. Of an election that shocked Facebook, even as its fallout put the company under siege. Of a series of external threats, defensive internal calculations, and false starts that delayed Facebook’s reckoning with its impact on global affairs and its users’ minds.” Wired’s Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein with an excellent look inside the two years that shook Facebook—and the world.