Facebook’s Id Is Showing

Was Facebook responsible for the election of Donald Trump in 2016? Trump’s campaign says yes. Most of his opposition says yes. And now a ranking executive at Facebook, Andrew Bosworth, says yes. “I think the answer is yes, but not for the reasons anyone thinks,” Bosworth wrote in an internal “Thoughts for 2020” post that leaked yesterday, and that he subsequently posted in full. “He didn’t get elected because of Russia or misinformation or Cambridge Analytica.”

So what did get him elected then?

First, you have to know who is talking here. Bosworth, known inside and outside Facebook as Boz, is the company’s id. As one of Mark Zuckerberg’s computer-science teachers and a very early employee, Bosworth has unusual latitude to say the quiet parts of Facebook’s self-conception out loud. He does this