Giday, humans. Welcome to safe space for dangerous ideas. Here's a dangerous idea for you.

All of the negative effects that you know accrue to you from social media use, the algorithms

that reinforce what you want to believe and demonize the things that you don't want to believe,

the echo chambers that keep you liking and commenting and scrolling and clicking and sharing

and arguing, the recommendations that tailored just for an automaton like you to ingest

into your algorithmic robot brain, the self-judgment that comes from overuse of social

media, the anxiety, the bullying, the preying of perverts on underage users, that whole panoply,

that universe, that mosaic of negative consequences that constitute the vast psychological

experiment that is social media use

in the 21st century, all those downsides may not be the regrettable side effects of the

core product of connecting people. Those negative effects may actually be part of the core product, fundamental to its

addictiveness, fundamental to its business model, and the people who run those social media

companies know it.

That is basically the conclusion to which today's guest came when she left Facebook and

became a whistleblower.

She collaborated with the Wall Street Journal a few years ago on a bombshell series of articles,

unveiling what Facebook knows about what it could do to prevent user harm and what it is failing to do.

Mark Zuckerberg has been a busy little bunny on the witness stand in Washington, D.C. lately.

You may have heard amid all of the Trump chaos that there is a big court case going on.

The U.S. government is suing meta under antitrust for allegedly maintaining a monopoly.

It could reshape the future of social media, depending on which way the case goes.

It's one of the most consequential antitrust cases in tech history.

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