Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning dramatizes Frances Haugen’s decision to expose Facebook’s internal documents, and critics are already debating its triumphant ending. But the movie leaves out the millions of people who were living inside those secrets every day: creators. Starting around 2018, the advice in every creator group quietly shifted, and nobody explained why. The leaked documents eventually revealed what was behind it.
What’s Trending breaks down the scoring system that reshaped what we post, what we see, and why our feeds feel angrier than they used to. We look at what Facebook’s own researchers warned about, what the company chose to change and what it didn’t, and why the incentive behind it never fully went away. If you’ve ever wondered why so much of the internet seems built to make you mad, this is where it started.
