Hi, I'm Naomi Shaven. Welcome to Axios Recap, where we cover one big story. Today's Monday,

December 13th, and we're focused on Facebook's very, very bad year.

This weekend next, I'll be hosting conversations with my colleagues from around the Axios newsroom

about the biggest stories and their beats over this last year, and what they're watching heading into 2022.

Today I'm speaking with Sarah Fisher, who writes the Axios Media Trends newsletter.

She watches news organizations, entertainment companies, and the social media landscape.

This year, one of the biggest stories that she covered was about how technology is impacting

our society, and it played out at the intersection of news media and one social media company in

particular, Facebook. Beginning in September with a series of reports from the Wall Street Journal,

there were dozens and dozens of stories that came out from a number of media outlets,

all examining thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents, now known as the Facebook

papers. This huge document dump showed that the company was conducting its own research into how its

platforms could be misused. So that includes fostering misinformation and harassment, but also how

things like the Instagram algorithm could exacerbate mental health crises like eating disorders.

And they showed that even as Facebook was researching all of these things, arguably the company

wasn't doing that much to address these issues.

In a moment, I'll be joined by Sarah Fisher to discuss how this new cycle played out, how it impacted Facebook, and what comes next for the media giant, which notably rebranded in the midst of the fallout.

We're joined now by Sarah Fisher, my colleague,

and author of Axios Media Trends. Hey, Sarah. Hi, Naomi. Let's start with a quick overview. The tech

giant took a massive hit, at least in the PR sense this year when thousands of leaked company

documents revealed internal concerns and warnings about how the

company's decisions were affecting society and politics.

...