What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month, on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

It's been one controversy after another for Facebook in these last few months, and this week was no different.

In fact, it was filled with bad news for Facebook. Literally.

Our friends today explained breakdown to latest.

Facebook changed its name today. It's now bookface. JK, that's dumb. It's bad place.

Okay, that's mean. It's Mark's face. That's just stupid. Okay, it's meta.

Not like the name is meta. Facebook's new name is meta.

And we'll explain why shortly, but this isn't an ad for Facebook.

So let's first talk about the problem, shall we? They are Legion.

A few weeks ago, we brought you a story about the Facebook whistleblower, Francis Hougins, the name, providing internal Facebook documents to the Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horowitz was the game,

and the journal went on to publish a series of damning stories using these documents. Instagram is bad for teens.

Facebook isn't doing enough to stop human trafficking and the algorithms on the platform are making people angrier.

Skip ahead to this week, and there's another big round of stories about Facebook originating from those same leaked documents this time from news outlets around the world.

Facebook struggled to prevent users from organizing around the January 6th insurrection.

The platform's algorithm weighs angry reactions as five times more important than regular likes.

And in one experiment, researchers created a test account for a fictional conservative user named Carol Smith from North Carolina.

It took just two days, two days before it recommended Carol join Facebook groups for QAnon. Yikes.

All these new revelations come from an unusual arrangement. A group of journalists who are usually competing to be first on the story actually kind of collaborated.

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