A look back at how Facebook and Twitter evolved over the 2010s, chasing size and influence at a cost to society that will take years to understand
The two companies had a bad run in the 2010s. It was their own fault. — It's been a rough decade for Facebook and Twitter. Tweets: @jason_kint , @buzzfeednewsuk , and @laurahelmuth See also Mediagazer Tweets: Jason Kint / @jason_kint : To this day, I don't understand how so consistently journalists say Kogan “gave” this data when the commercial contract to “sell” the Facebook data to Cambridge Analytica was disclosed in a public hearing. @Kantrowitz https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... @buzzfeednewsuk : Over the course of 10 years, Facebook and Twitter have made a series of misguided product decisions that transformed them from online amusement parks into hellscapes. Here's how it happened: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... Laura Helmuth / @laurahelmuth : Facebook and Twitter “prioritized growth and influence over safety ... achieving great wealth and power as a result, but at a cost to society that won't be fully calculable for some years to come.” Important history from @Kantrowitz https://www.buzzfeednews.com/ ... via @kantrowitz See also Mediagazer Expand More For Next Unexpand More For Next
Context & Ripple Effects
This BuzzFeed News retrospective lands at the end of a decade-defining arc for the two platforms. Facebook closed the 2010s at 2.45B users and in regulatory crosshairs, per the parallel decade retrospective of Facebook's growth into a major facet of life worldwide. Twitter's ledger is double-entry: the same decade saw it amplify young and marginalized voices while holding news organizations accountable, even as its growth-first choices compounded the harms.
The pivot point was 2018, when the [[a:928557|Cambridge Analytica scandal converted rapid public trust in tech companies handling personal data into resentment and distrust]]. The Kogan data sale Jason Kint flags in the description is the same episode. TechCrunch's October accounting of ten years of Facebook abusing publishers completes the picture: the costs fell on users, journalism, and civic life simultaneously.
First-order effects
- Facebook enters the 2020s facing regulators armed with a decade of evidence that growth was prioritized over safety, with its 2.45B-user scale making every product decision a policy event.
- Twitter must reconcile its genuine decade-long record of elevating marginalized voices and disciplining news organizations against the same growth-over-safety pattern BuzzFeed documents.
Second-order effects
- Publishers weighing Facebook's dedicated news tab traffic are negotiating from a documented history of platform abuse, which strengthens their case for direct-audience strategies over feed dependence.
- Advertisers now price reputational risk into both platforms, since the Cambridge Analytica aftermath showed that trust erosion translates directly into brand-safety exposure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the next decade's platform economics will be shaped by regulators and by trust treated as infrastructure rather than a marketing asset — the cost side of the size-and-influence trade finally entering the balance sheet.
- The full societal cost of disinformation and attention-scale growth remains genuinely unmeasured, which argues for structural remedies (audits, interoperability, data portability) over one-off settlements.
The trend: The 2010s growth-at-all-costs era of social platforms is closing, and the 2020s will be defined by whether Facebook and Twitter can convert scale into accountable governance faster than regulators and advertisers impose it.