I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

Amazon does similar things with promoted products. If you watch IMDB TV on your Amazon Prime video you get commercials for competitive products. Behind the scenes it's the same kinds of algorithms. I agree it's all about buying stuff so it's limited in scope and that is very different from social content. I have a lot of friends who watched that documentary and were like Michael I can't believe Facebook does X, Y. It's really a very large spectrum and thousands and thousands of independent things going on that is characterized as a person sitting in a control room watching everything you do and manipulating your behavior. That thinking it only polarizing things more and doing exactly what people are accusing Facebook of doing.