Google was so obsessed with beating Facebook that it missed an opportunity with Google+ to tackle the problems, like radicalization, plaguing social media now
As a member of the marketing team for Google's once-hyped Google+ social network (remember that?) Tweets: @caro , @marypcbuk , @felizari , @gpanger , @mims , and @chrismessina Tweets: Caroline McCarthy / @caro : I wrote a few words about how Google was so obsessed with beating Facebook at social media that it missed an opportunity to tackle the current problems plaguing social before they spiraled out of hand. https://spectator.us/... Mary Branscombe / @marypcbuk : and you thought Microsoft divisions used to be isolated: how Google+ missed that social media was going toxic - by ignoring existing Google social media going toxic https://twitter.com/... Fermintxo Elizari / @felizari : Google was so singularly obsessed with beating Facebook at its own game (with G+) that it missed broader trends that were about to rattle the industry https://spectator.us/... @gpanger : “Because Google made its money by showing people ads, it had a vested interest in growing the internet itself, and in finding new ways to make it useful.” https://www.wired.com/... Christopher Mims / @mims : Good account from an insider at Google+ Bottom line: The clueless dudes who made Facebook bad had virtual clones working at Google+ and it meant one of the world's most valuable companies missed a chance to beat Facebook by doing better. https://twitter.com/... @chrismessina : I was there too and I don't think there was enough imagination in all of Silicon Valley to have predicted how social media went sideways. Nor was there really any concern. The problem being solved by Google+ was the future of advertising, not of democracy. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Caroline McCarthy, who worked on Google+'s marketing team, is writing a retrospective from inside the project: Mashable's earlier autopsy had already framed Google+ as an expensive attempt to unseat Facebook, and her argument sharpens that framing — the competitive obsession crowded out any chance to design against radicalization before those problems metastasized.
The timing matters because Google's own record complicates the nostalgia: the undisclosed Google+ data bug exposed from 2015 to mid-2018 showed the same win-at-all-costs instinct operating on privacy, even as Google drew less user outrage than Facebook in a crisis. The question she raises outlived Google+ itself — Threads' launch later revived it, with coverage asking whether Meta's new network could avoid repeating the same mistakes.
First-order effects
- For Google, the piece recasts the Google+ postmortem: the failure is no longer just a lost market race against Facebook but a foregone chance to build moderation-first social design while the network still had shape.
- For Facebook, contemporaneous critiques like this one compound the pressure visible in reporting that Zuckerberg and other executives shelved internal research on the platform's polarizing effect, weakening efforts to apply its conclusions to products.
Second-order effects
- Meta's later entrants inherit the lesson directly: Threads coverage argues it must give users a compelling reason to return rather than relying on Instagram's scale — implicitly conceding that growth-first mechanics are what produced the toxicity Google+ might have addressed.
- Google's comparatively mild backlash in publicity crises reduces the reputational forcing function on it to lead on social-platform safety, leaving the burden on regulators and press scrutiny aimed at Facebook instead.
Third-order effects
- If platform competition is scored on user counts rather than harm mitigation, safety problems get deferred until external pressure arrives — the parallel records of Google's undisclosed bug and Facebook's shelved research point to a shared structural incentive, not one company's lapse.
- The pattern suggests social networks will keep being audited retroactively by former insiders and journalists, making internal culture around metrics a durable subject of regulatory and public interest.
The trend: Social platforms are increasingly judged not on whether they won the user race but on whether their growth-first design let harms like radicalization spiral — a reckoning each new entrant, Threads included, inherits.