The day the modern internet was born

Max Read writes the Work Friend column for The New York Times and the Read Max newsletter.

The internet has many birthdays. ARPANET, the research forerunner to today’s commercial network, was born Oct. 29, 1969, when the first message was sent between two computers in California. The World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee’s generational advance in user-friendliness, was born on Aug. 6, 1991, the day it went public.

But the modern internet – the internet we use today; the one through which our social, political, cultural and economic worlds have been routed; the thing on which you are more likely than not reading this essay – wasn’t born until much later, on Sept. 5, 2006: The day Facebook launched the News Feed.

The “news feed,” by which I mean not just the specific Facebook feature but the generic, infinitely scrolling, algorithmically sorted, constantly updating central list of “news” that greets users of nearly any social app or platform, has become so ubiquitous and standard that it can be hard to still think of it as a “feature” or “product” rather than as, simply, The Way Things Are. No design feature has been more widely copied or influential this century: An infinite scroll of updates presorted for the user is now the default paradigm and expected user interface for any new “social” app, and indeed for almost any new app or website in general.

But the News Feed itself has shifted the way we understand and think about the internet, information and each other. So many of the dominant experiences and categories of the modern internet derive directly from Facebook’s News Feed.

Without the News Feed, on which algorithmic and personalized sorting of content was first developed, we wouldn’t have the quasi-mystical figure of “the algorithm” determining our cultural consumption and taste. We wouldn’t have the dominating and suffocating category of “slop,” or low-rent content created to fit the demands of the infinite feed. We wouldn’t “doomscroll” – we might not scroll much at all – and we wouldn’t have Twitter, Instagram or TikTok, as we understand them. Nor, without the News Feed, would we have President Donald Trump.

Back in the fall of 2006, of course, the News Feed was mostly just a solution to a problem. In the early days, when Facebook was available only to a few dozen colleges and universities, the social network was effectively a collection of links.

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You would navigate to the home page on your PC, log in, and, basically, click around, seeking out your friends and acquaintances and crushes and enemies’ profiles – writing on their walls, poking them or simply monitoring changes from afar.

From the vantage point of 2025, this probably seems charming. But it was inconvenient, and, worse, at least as far as Facebook’s engineers were concerned, inefficient. The company had found that allowing users to sort their friends’ profiles and photo albums in order of most recently updated had increased pageviews significantly, and executives started to kick around the idea of directly serving to users a list of recent updates, personalized to their networks. Instead of poking around from profile to profile, you simply needed to visit the main Facebook website, and every new change would be served up directly to you in a feed, one after the other.

The idea was unpopular among the company’s rank and file. But Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was convinced the News Feed was a necessary step in Facebook’s development, and he tasked a small team of engineers and designers to put together what he was calling a “major product evolution.” This would be the biggest update of the website’s young history, and the most complex challenge its employees had ever undertaken.

But by late summer 2006, they had the product working, and engineer Chris Cox (now Meta Inc.’s chief product officer) was served the first News Feed update in history: “Mark has added a photo.” He later told the journalist David Kirkpatrick: “It was like the Frankenstein moment when the finger moves.”

“Frankenstein’s monster” is a portentous metaphor for the News Feed, but not necessarily an overblown one. It would be years before News Feed became a dominant force in news media – at this point, the “news” was limited to recaps of Facebook activities – but even the early, basic News Feed represented a paradigm shift in how we use the internet.

Mr. Cox and the other engineers on the team had taken what was a relatively simple directory and, by transforming it into a scrolling firehose of information, ordered for the user by an algorithmic sorting mechanism, had turned it inside out. Instead of you, the user, going to profiles and travelling from one to the next, the profiles would, effectively, come to you.

Up until this point, the paradigmatic experience of the internet had been “browsing,” clicking from hyperlink to hyperlink, allowing yourself to follow your whims and obsessions and interests down rabbit holes of interlinked sites. But on the News Feed, “the algorithm” would supposedly detect your whims, tell you what your own interests were, and serve it all up to you in an infinite list, without any hyperlinks needed. “Browsing” was out. “Scrolling” was in.

Those of us who were the right age in the fall of 2006 (I was 21, and Facebook had been at my college for two years) will remember the next part of the story: User revolt. On the day of News Feed’s debut, the feature’s product manager, an early employee named Ruchi Sanghvi, posted a chipper blog post outlining the changes, under the title “Facebook Gets a Facelift.” The very first comment: “Turn this shit off!”

Within hours, Ms. Sanghvi had unexpectedly become a Facebook-wide villain (groups sprung up with names like “Ruchi is the devil”) and Facebook’s employees had been inundated with complaints and invective. The following day, the company hired security to escort employees to the office and guide them past the scrum of reporters that had shown up outside.

The problem, as users saw it, was privacy. “You went a bit too far this time, Facebook,” Ben Parr, a Northwestern junior who created the single largest anti-News Feed Facebook Group, wrote. “Very few of us want everyone automatically knowing what we update … news feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go.”

Until the News Feed, users could expect a certain degree of privacy simply out of friction: Not everyone would see immediately – or maybe ever – that you’d changed a relationship status or “liked” a photo, and it would require attentive work to see all of someone’s activity. But with the News Feed, no work was required, and everyone who was friends with you would be effectively alerted to what you were getting up on the site.

To Mr. Zuckerberg, this was not a convincing complaint. “None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes,” he wrote in a quasi-apologetic post, published the evening of the News Feed’s debut. “This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about.”

At first, Mr. Zuckerberg seemed unable to recognize any distinction between the nominally public but inconveniently accessible Facebook that you browsed, and the frictionlessly available, continuously broadcasting Facebook that you scrolled. Only a few days later, in another post – following a two-day sprint to add privacy features under the hood – did he admit that he’d violated the trust of users: “We really messed this one up,” he wrote. “We didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away.”

But the damage had been done – and would continue to be done. The reigning presumption in the feed era is that anything you do online should be, by default, fodder for others to consume. Among the legacies of the News Feed is that you can no longer expect the kind of privacy-through-friction that characterized the early web, and there is no longer an important distinction between “public” and “broadcast” online.

With its profiles and groups, Facebook had already helped cement the idea of life online as a public performance. But it wasn’t until the News Feed, and its insistence on notifying everyone in your circle of everything you were doing, that all your daily online activity, and not just the static profile you could assiduously maintain, became an extension of that performance.

In some sense that cycle of performance and consumption – and the creation of a loop of constant engagement – was what Mr. Zuckerberg had been after with News Feed in the first place, and why he held firm amidst the blowback. By his own standards, he’d made the right call: “Under usual circumstances if about 10 per cent of your user base starts to boycott the product, you would shut it down. But we saw a very unusual pattern emerge,” Ms. Sanghvi explained to journalist Adam Fisher years later. “Despite the fact that there were these revolts and these petitions and people were lined up outside the office, they were digging the product. They were actually using it, and they were using it twice as much as before News Feed.”

This dynamic, too, is a legacy that resonates throughout Silicon Valley. News Feed is among the most prominent and significant examples of a software company trusting its user metrics over its users’ stated preferences, and getting rewarded for it. It’s a foundational myth for the faith in “revealed preference” that keeps our social networks clogged with emotionally resonant political news, misleading clickbait, AI slop, and other types of malevolent and/or tacky content that nonetheless draws clicks, reactions, comments and shares.

Since the success of News Feed, what we as users claim to want from apps is generally ignored in favour of what improves performance and engagement metrics like “shares” or “time on site.” Even when what improves engagement is obviously damaging.

In the years that followed, News Feed-style features – omnivorous updates, infinite scroll, algorithmically sorted content – became all but required in social-media apps. (As proof, consider that Venmo, founded in 2009, includes a central “news” feed despite the fact that it’s a peer-to-peer payments platform.)

The original News Feed, for its part, became more and more expansive, soon gathering and sorting not just intra-Facebook activity but posts and links from users. Mr. Zuckerberg said he wanted Facebook to be “the best personalized newspaper in the world,” and transformed the business of online media by tweaking the feed’s sorting algorithm to favour links to external websites. Suddenly digital publishers found themselves flooded with traffic from Facebook’s billion users; just as suddenly, Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook’s management decided to turn the dial the other way, and the floodgates closed, leaving a generation of well-funded journalism startups stranded.

It wasn’t just news media being transformed by the new, news-feed-ified internet. In 2011, protests erupted across the Arab world, and crowds galvanized by the stream of protest activity visible on their Facebook and Twitter feeds toppled regimes in Tunisia, Yemen and Egypt. The structure of the News Feed, its lack of top-down editorial control, and its spooky algorithmic ability to surface news to people who might not otherwise see it, was perfect for mobilizing previously tuned-out political actors. (What it was less well-suited to, as the years that followed showed, was keeping the crowds organized as a political force.)

Closer to home, the increasing importance of social news feeds as news source – albeit a disorienting, decentralized, unedited one – was undercutting the power of the establishment institutions that had, for the better part of a century, determined the boundaries of acceptable political discourse.

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At the same time, sorting algorithms, by rewarding heavily shared, commented, and “liked” posts, were incentivizing divisive, emotionally charged news stories (and “news” stories). It’s probably not fair to say that the News Feed was the reason that Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. But it’s hard to imagine him winning without it.

The cycle of right-wing populist ascendance in the late 2010s probably marked the height of News Feed’s political power. As part of the subsequent anti-Facebook backlash, Mr. Zuckerberg pulled back from “news,” and announced that the company would overhaul the News Feed to emphasize friends and family. These days, if you visit Facebook, you probably won’t get much of either friends and family or outside news: You’re most likely to see a lot of weird, bad, often non-political AI slop, from pages and groups you’ve never heard of, mostly operated by spammers from outside the country hoping to scrape together a few bucks from Facebook’s engagement incentives programs.

But even if News Feed itself no longer quite has the power to make or break industries overnight, its influence persists. The real legacy of the News Feed isn’t the specific Facebook product, but the internet transformed in its image. Instagram, TikTok, X: The feeds that constitute these sites may not resemble the rickety news feed over which Chris Cox and Ruchi Sanghvi laboured in 2006. But they are its direct descendants – places of passive, algorithmically steered viewing, where users can experience what the documentarian Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman calls “a roaring wave of digital consciousness that was at the same time a laboratory monitoring our choices within the feed in order to tweak our future experiences.”

Not many people would positively affirm the feed as the medium of choice for going online. But it seems unlikely to be replaced, either by good old-fashioned browsing, or by some new paradigm. It’s not just that the feed-based social platforms still rake in an astonishing amount of cash – though their financial power makes them difficult to take on or regulate. It’s that the news feed is a self-justifying technology, perfectly designed to obsess and addict its audience.

If the thousands of people protesting on Facebook in 2006 couldn’t budge Mark Zuckerberg and strangle the feed in its cradle, what hope do any of us have now, when three billion or more people are scrolling on it every month?