The Biggest Technology Failures of 2016

Facebook’s News Feed
“Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement.” That never happened. Yet this headline was among a tsunami of falsehoods spread on Facebook, the 1.7 billion-member social network. CEO Mark Zuckerberg denies Facebook is a media company or that it can influence global events like elections, an idea he called “pretty crazy” (even though Facebook also sells political ads). But the public sees it differently. President Obama called fake news an existential threat to our “democratic freedoms” and “prosperity.”
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.