Meta

Mark Zuckerberg and classmates launched Facebook at Harvard in 2004. By 2010 it was large enough to employ the staff of a media company: engineers, advertising sales, and a growing group of people paid to look at what other people posted and decide whether it could stay.

The company renamed itself Meta in 2021, after the product where it hopes to spend the next decade. The revenue is still the advertising on the older networks. The name change did not change the job of moderation, which remains the work most characteristic of the firm.

Moderation as an occupation

Much of the review is done by contractors, often outside the United States, working to a policy written in Menlo Park. They are not always Meta employees. They are part of how the company functions, and the psychological cost of the work has been documented in reporting and in lawsuits. Inside the company, product managers and engineers tune the ranking that decides what those reviewers, and the users, will see. A social network is a publishing operation that does not call itself one.

Still hiring for the feed

Meta is still independent. It employs tens of thousands directly and many more through the contractors. The 2010 chapter's point stands: the new jobs were not only the app developers. They were the people hired to tend a public made of other people's speech.

Moderation as an occupation

Still hiring for the feed

The work it organized

On the timeline

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