A Tiny Outrage Machine, Sucking the Exhaust From a Giant One

Frances Haugen, a former Facebook data scientist, copied thousands of pages of internal documents and webpages before she left the company. Then she shared those materials with The Wall Street Journal, which began publishing stories about them last month under the heading “The Facebook Files.” Weeks later, she began to parcel the materials out to a consortium of news organizations, including The Atlantic. In that context, the files have come to be known as “The Facebook Papers,” drawing a lineage back to revelations about the U.S. military intervention in Vietnam 50 years ago—the Pentagon Papers.

But the differences between the Facebook Papers and their Cold War precursor are more relevant than their similarities. The entire mechanism for producing, storing, and disseminating knowledge has changed completely over the past half century. The Pentagon Papers were, in sum, a single narrative: a 3,000-page history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, annotating 4,000 more pages of primary-source material, and written up to be a coherent historical record