Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it.
Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users' ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming …
Context & Ripple Effects
The arc here runs from openness back to enclosure. In March 2009, O'Reilly Radar argued Facebook was no longer a walled garden, opening its graph to outside developers; by November 2010, TechCrunch was asking whether anything could stop the Facebook juggernaut at all. Anil Dash's essay is the counterpoint to both: he contends the openness phase has curdled into an active campaign against off-site navigation, hitting hardest at the very publishers who adopted Facebook's social plugins.
The charge lands in a rough fortnight for the company. A coordinated spam attack flooded the platform with pornographic and violent links in mid-November, making users wary of clicking any shared link, and Facebook is simultaneously wrangling with the Federal Trade Commission over how much personal information it makes public. Zuckerberg's stated vision of routing people to media through the strength of social connections is exactly the mechanism Dash says is being abused.
First-order effects
- Publishers and independent sites that embraced Facebook's sharing technologies face a direct hit to outbound traffic, since the platform's own users are being trained out of clicking external links.
- Facebook must defend its core growth mechanic — social sharing — while a spam flood and an FTC privacy dispute erode user confidence in what appears in the feed.
Second-order effects
- Sites dependent on Facebook referrals face a pricing decision: keep investing in deeper platform integration on worse terms, or rebuild direct distribution channels they had been abandoning.
- Rival platforms and open-web advocates gain a framing gift — 'gaslighting' recasts Facebook's conduct from competitive strategy into a trust violation, which is harder for advertisers and partners to wave off.
Third-order effects
- If one company mediates most social sharing, web navigation itself becomes governed by its feed algorithms rather than by links — a structural shift from the open hyperlink economy toward platform-mediated distribution.
- Sustained scrutiny from regulators like the FTC plus critics like Dash points toward trust becoming the battleground on which platform power is contested, ahead of features or scale.
The trend: Web distribution is consolidating inside a handful of platform feeds, turning the once-open link economy into a trust-and-control contest between platforms and the publishers who depend on them.