Facebook and Instagram operator rejects EU claim that efforts to moderate content are 'insufficient'.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Walt Hunter, a contributing editor who focuses on poetry and fiction. His past stories cover AI’s poor attempts at writing poetry, the intimate work of Louise Glück, and Jorie Graham’s musings on the demise of the world.

Walt recently became a father, and his 15-week-old son, Julian, has already exposed him to a new catalog of media, including the book Spring Is Here and “newborn eats dad’s nose” videos. When Walt isn’t watching kid-friendly YouTube videos, he enjoys reading Ali Smith’s clever and engrossing novels; binge-watching Blue Lights, a police show set in Belfast; and listening to “A Day in the Water,” by Christine and the Queens.

First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The accidental speaker Why your vet bill is so high The happiness trinity

The Culture Survey: Walt Hunter

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: My favorite show in a long, long time (well, at least since the previous season of Shetland ended) is Blue Lights (out now on BritBox). The show, which is set in Belfast, follows three rookie police officers and their more seasoned partners. It’s a nail-biter with romance and some comic relief. Perfect for binge-watching during the first few weeks of our son’s 3 a.m. meals.

An other online creator that I’m a fan of: For the past 100-plus days since Julian was born, I’ve been exploring the universe of “newborn eats dad’s nose” videos. In doing so, I have broken Instagram and now receive only recommendations of videos of people playing the piano with chickens on their heads or pushing seals around in carts. [Related: The algorithm that makes preschoolers obsessed with YouTube]

Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: Julian recommends the book Spring Is Here for the ever-surprising calf cameo near the end.

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: Ours, by Phillip B. Williams, a novel about a town of freed slaves in 19th-century Missouri. For a nonfiction option, Winters in the World, by Eleanor Parker, is an enchanting book about the seasons and weather of medieval England. Can I include some poetry? Right now I’m reading the work of Ama Codjoe, Divya Victor, and Jenny Xie while also exploring some of the 19-century poets published by The Atlantic—Celia Thaxter, for example, who wrote beautiful descriptive verse about the coasts of New England.

An author I will read anything by: Ali Smith. I started with her quartet of seasonal novels right after Autumn came out, and then went back to her earlier works. She has a reputation for clever wordplay, which is certainly a feature of her style. But she would be hard to categorize as a postmodernist; she’s really just an incredible novelist in the long line of Laurence Sterne, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, with some Muriel Spark thrown in. Her characters struggle with the inhospitable conditions of the present by insisting on friendship and forgiveness. And there’s a beautiful touch of allegory in her work—characters can have names such as Lux and Art—which I take to be a reminder of the place of stories in our everyday lives. [Related: Ali Smith spins modernity into myth in Winter.]

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: This isn’t really a museum, but my partner, Lindsay, and I recently visited the Eden Theatre in La Ciotat, France, and watched a few Lumière films (the train pulling into La Ciotat Station is one of the first films, along with the lesser-known Repas de Bébé). I like very small and focused museums and shows: Last summer, the Institut du Monde Arabe, in Paris, had an exhibition on Jean Genet’s suitcases and papers. Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers is one of my favorite novels, and it was neat to see some of his ephemeral scribbles. Another recent favorite was the Judson dance exhibition at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York City a few years back.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I was living in Greenville, South Carolina, in 2017 and went to a random show in a record store around the corner from our house. A band called Friendship, from Philadelphia, played a quiet song called “Skip to the Good Part.” It’s a barroom love song, and the singer wistfully mumbles encouraging lines such as “Our days are full of shit and so few.” The loud song is just a song I play loud, and that’s “A Day in the Water,” by Christine and the Queens. This song is for a cool morning in early summer, or a too-hot afternoon in late summer. It pulls you out of your reality and into a space that feels like pure music. Music for me is either ruefulness or transcendence.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Ann Hulbert’s story on the theme of marriage in George Eliot’s novels. It’s one of the best pieces of literary criticism I’ve read in many years. Ann argues that marriage opens rather than forecloses possibilities for experimentation in Eliot’s fiction. I love the idea that a novel might encourage us to rethink the coordinates of reality and to treat what seems permanent as susceptible to revision and change.

The last thing that made me cry: The film Petite Maman, by Céline Sciamma, a short fable in which a little girl meets her mother as a little girl. It’s a perfect work of art. In my favorite scene, the two kids share headphones and listen to a song called “The Music of the Future,” which then plays in the film as they take a canoe out to a mysterious pyramid. Almost everything I like about art is in this scene.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.”

The Week Ahead

The Idea of You, a romantic-comedy film starring Anne Hathaway as a single mother who starts a whirlwind relationship with a famous singer (premieres on Prime Video on Thursday) The Veil, a spy-thriller miniseries, starring Elisabeth Moss, about two women who are caught in a dangerous web of truth and lies (debuts Tuesday on Hulu) Mean Boys, a collection of essays by Geoffrey Mak about our societal thirst for novelty (out Tuesday)

Essay

Gregory Halpern / Magnum

Why a Dog’s Death Hits So Hard

By Tommy Tomlinson

My mom died six years ago, a few hours after I sat on the edge of her bed at her nursing home in Georgia and talked with her for the last time. My wife, Alix, and I were staying with my brother and his wife, who lived just down the road. My brother got the phone call not long after midnight. He woke me up, and we went down to the nursing home and walked the dim, quiet hallway to her room. She was in her bed, cold and still. I touched her face. But I didn’t cry.

Two years earlier, the veterinarian had come to our house in Charlotte, North Carolina, to see our old dog, Fred … We had him for 14 and a half years, until he got a tumor on his liver. He was too old for surgery to make any sense. Alix and I held him in our laps as the vet gave him two shots, one to make him sleep, the other to make him still. All three of us cried as he eased away in our arms.

By any measure, I loved my mom more than our dog … So why, in the moment of their passing, did I cry for him but not for her?

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The story that’s holding Taylor Swift back Why does Taylor Swift see herself as an albatross? A sexy tennis thriller—yes, really We’re all reading wrong. Bad Bunny has it all—and that’s the problem. What the author of Frankenstein knew about human nature The new quarter-life crisis

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Columbia University’s impossible position Welcome to the TikTok meltdown. The Trumpification of the Supreme Court

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A view of the Cuernos del Paine, a cluster of steep granite peaks in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park (Lukasz Nowak1 / Getty)

Take in the splendor of Chile’s national parks, which protect many endangered species, wild landscapes, and natural wonders.

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Even by the standards of Congress, the past few weeks have been a lesson in hypocrisy. Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation that will require TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States—all over concerns that the Communist Party of China uses the app for surveillance. Yet just a few days earlier, Biden had renewed a law synonymous with American surveillance: Section 702.

You may never have heard of Section 702, but the sweeping, George W. Bush–era mandate gives intelligence agencies the authority to track online communication, such as text messages, emails, and Facebook posts. Legally, Americans aren’t supposed to be surveilled through this law. But from 2020 to 2021, the FBI misused Section 702 data more than 278,000 times, including to surveil Americans linked to the January 6 riot and Black Lives Matter protests. (The FBI claims it has since reformed its policies.)

The contradiction between TikTok and Section 702 is maddening, but it points to lawmakers’ continued failure to wrestle with the most basic questions of how to protect the American public in the algorithmic age. It’s quite fair to worry, as Congress does, that TikTok’s mass collection of personal data can pose a threat to our data. Yet Meta, X, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other popular platform also suck up our personal data. And while the fear around foreign meddling that has animated the TikTok ban has largely rested on hypotheticals, there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that Facebook, at least, has effectively operated as a kind of “hostile foreign power,” as The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance put it, with “its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy.”

[Read: The largest autocracy on Earth]

Congress has largely twiddled its thumbs as social-media companies have engaged in this kind of chicanery—until TikTok. ByteDance is hardly a candidate for sainthood, but who would want to beatify Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? Abroad, America’s surveillance draws much of the same political condemnation Congress is now levying at China. The privacy advocate Max Schrems repeatedly sued Facebook to stop the company from sharing Europeans’ data with the U.S., where the information could be searched by intelligence agencies. He won multiple times. Last year, European Union regulators fined Meta $1.3 billion for transferring Facebook user data to servers in the United States.

Congress’s tech dysfunction extends well beyond this privacy double standard. The growing backlash to platforms such as Facebook and Instagram is not aimed at any of the substantial issues around privacy and surveillance, such as the ubiquitous tracking of our online activity and the widespread use of facial recognition. Instead, they’re defined by an amorphous moral panic.

Take the Kids Online Safety Act, an alarmingly popular bill in Congress that would radically remake internet governance in the United States. Under KOSA, companies would have a duty to help defend minors from a broad constellation of harms, including mental-health impacts, substance use, and types of sexual content. The bill might actually require companies to gather even more data about everything we see and say, every person with whom we have contact, every time we use our devices. That’s because you can’t systematically defend against Congress’s laundry list of digital threats without massive surveillance of everything we say and every person we meet on these platforms. For companies such as Signal, the encrypted-messaging app that political dissidents rely on around the world, this could mean being forced to operate more like Facebook, WhatsApp, and the other platforms they’ve always sought to provide an alternative to. Or, more likely, it would mean that companies that prioritize privacy simply couldn’t do business in the U.S. at all.

Perhaps the biggest protection Americans have against measures such as KOSA is how badly they’re designed. They all rest on proving users’ age, but the truth is that there’s simply no way to know whether someone scrolling on their phone is a teen or a retiree. States such as Louisiana and Utah have experimented with invasive and discriminatory technologies such as facial recognition and facial-age estimation, despite evidence that the technology is far more error-prone when it comes to nonwhite faces, especially Black women’s faces.  

But these misguided bills haven’t completely derailed lawmakers pushing real reforms to U.S. mass surveillance. Within days of the House passing the TikTok ban and Section 702 renewal, it also passed the Fourth Amendment Is Not for Sale Act, which closes the loophole that lets police pay companies for our data without getting a warrant. Yet the bill now finds itself in limbo in the Senate.

Regulating technology doesn’t have to be this hard. Even when the products are complex, solutions can be shockingly simple, banning harmful business and policing practices as they emerge. But Congress remains unwilling or unable to take on the types of mass surveillance that social-media firms use to make billions, or that intelligence agencies use to grow their ever-expanding pool of data. For now, America’s real surveillance threats are coming from inside the house.

Xiaohongshu has become the go-to platform for young women to discuss everything from fashion to domestic violence.

Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger host thousands of advertisements for sexually explicit AI “girlfriend” chatbots, according to a new report. The generative artificial intelligence chatbots engage with users and generate images and suggestive texts. They also collect a lot of user data.

Read more...

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Over the past decade, sleep has become better understood as a core part of wellness. But the stressors of modern life mean that Americans are getting less of it.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Supreme Court goes through the looking glass on presidential immunity. The inflation plateau The campus-left occupation that broke higher education

Sleep No More

In the 1980s, when Rafael Pelayo was a young medical student setting out in the field of sleep research, people thought he was wasting his time. At that point, our culture was not so obsessed with the subject of rest. Now, he told me, people acknowledge that he was onto something—and insomniacs circle him “like sharks to blood” when they hear what he does for a living. Pelayo, a clinical professor at the Stanford Sleep Medicine Center, says that the “tide is changing” in how society values sleep. Over the past decade, how, and how much, we sleep has become a major health and wellness concern.

It’s a subject on Americans’ minds: Late last year, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 2001, a majority of surveyed American adults said they would feel better if they slept more; 57 percent of people surveyed said that they need to get more sleep, up from 43 percent in 2013, when the data were last gathered.

People’s self-reported quantities of sleep are also on the decline. Compared with a decade ago, fewer people report getting eight hours or more of sleep, and more people say they get five hours or less. Just 36 percent of women report getting the sleep they need—down from more than half in 2013.

As anyone who has lain awake at night knows, anxiety can affect sleep. That Americans say they are not sleeping as well as they reported in 2013 likely can be blamed in part on the stresses of the pandemic, Brynn K. Dredla, a neurologist and sleep-medicine specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, told me. “From a survival standpoint, if we’re under stress, our body thinks, Well, I have to be awake to deal with that stress,” she explained. Our brains have trouble distinguishing between acute danger, such as a bear attack, and chronic stress. “For us to sleep, we need to have a physically and psychologically safe environment,” she said. (A cold, dark, quiet room—with Instagram and news apps far away from the bed and the mind—doesn’t hurt either.)

Teenagers aren’t sleeping enough, and they’re experiencing high levels of stress—particularly teen girls. Blaming the ubiquity of the smartphone for bad sleep would be easy, but Pelayo finds that too simplistic—after all, we “had sleep issues way before the phones came out,” he noted. Teens aren’t getting enough sleep, Pelayo argued, in part because school tends to start at such an ungodly hour (he has advocated for later start times, a legislative effort that has gained momentum in states including California and Florida). It doesn’t help that adolescents are generally not great at recognizing when they are sleepy. Teens need a lot of sleep, Dredla explained, and sleep deprivation often makes them frustrated, which in turn “will lead to behaviors that actually can start promoting wakefulness,” such as napping or drinking caffeine. It’s not just teens—anyone can build up “sleep debt” and get into a cycle of sleeping poorly, stimulating themselves to stay awake, having trouble sleeping at night, and doing it all over again.

As sleep has become more central to Americans’ conception of wellness, companies have swooped in to try to package sleep as a luxury good. A cottage industry of products, including specialized pillows, apps, and pills, has sprung up in recent years promising to help people sleep better. Some simple pieces of technology—better mattresses, better cooling systems—have indeed enhanced sleep over the decades. But you don’t necessarily need to buy more stuff in order to sleep better. Savvy marketing makes people think the solution is complex, but at its core, the human body wants to sleep. “You were sleeping in utero,” Pelayo reminded me.

Of course, knowing this is not always enough to help a person struggling to get solid sleep. Pelayo advises that a good step for people having trouble sleeping is to wake up at the same time every morning. Forcing yourself to fall asleep is nearly impossible; if someone offered you $1,000 to fall asleep immediately, it might get even harder. But, he said, you can make yourself wake up consistently.

A good night of sleep consists of four factors, Pelayo explained: amount of sleep, quality of sleep, timing of sleep, and state of mind. That last one is key, he said—if you don’t look forward to going to bed, or if you dread waking up in the morning, you may have a very hard time sleeping. People tend to blame themselves when they don’t sleep well. He suggests that a better route for such people is to try to move past “that self-blame, because it’s not helpful. We want to figure out what’s happening.” It could be that you have a sleep disorder; many women, for example, develop sleep apnea after menopause.

Over the decades, Pelayo has watched sleep wellness become more valued, in parallel to many Americans beginning to internalize the benefits of eating healthy foods. “Waking up tired is like leaving a restaurant hungry,” Pelayo said. Though many Americans seem to feel that way these days, he retains hope. The good news about sleep? Everyone can do it. “It’s a fun gig as a sleep doctor, because most patients get better.”

Related:

The Protestant sleep ethic Can medieval sleeping habits fix America’s insomnia?

Today’s News

An appeals court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s sex-crimes conviction in New York, where he has been serving his prison sentence. Since he was also convicted of sex offenses in Los Angeles, in 2022, his release is unlikely. The Supreme Court heard arguments in Donald Trump’s presidential-immunity case, addressing the question of whether a former president can enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for conduct related to official acts that took place during their time in office. The Biden administration finalized a new regulation that would significantly reduce emissions and pollution from coal-fueled power plants by 2032.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: For centuries, Jews were accused of preparing their Passover food with Christian blood. Yair Rosenberg investigates the dark legacy and ongoing body count of this ancient anti-Semitic myth.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Why Your Vet Bill Is So High

By Helaine Olen

In the pandemic winter of 2020, Katie, my family’s 14-year-old miniature poodle, began coughing uncontrollably. After multiple vet visits, and more than $1,000 in bills, a veterinary cardiologist diagnosed her with heart failure. Our girl, a dog I loved so much that I wrote an essay about how I called her my “daughter,” would likely die within nine months.

Katie survived for almost two years … [Her] extended life didn’t come cheap. There were repeated scans, echocardiograms, and blood work, and several trips to veterinary emergency rooms. One drug alone cost $300 a month, and that was after I shopped aggressively for discounts online.

People like me have fueled the growth of what you might call Big Vet. As household pets have risen in status—from mere animals to bona fide family members—so, too, has owners’ willingness to spend money to ensure their well-being. Big-money investors have noticed.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

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Listen. In the latest episode of Radio Atlantic, Gary Shteyngart details his “seven agonizing nights” aboard the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever.

Analyze. In Taylor Swift’s “The Albatross”—a bonus track on her new album, The Tortured Poets Department—she identifies with the notorious bird from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem. Why does she see herself that way?

Play our daily crossword.

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Meta is ready to put its AI assistant in the ring with ChatGPT in the chatbot fight.

Read more...

Illustrations by Frank Dorrey

A few years ago, Stephanie Williams and her husband fielded a question from their son: How had they met?

So they told him. They’d first encountered each other on a website called BlackPlanet.

To the 5-year-old, the answer seemed fantastical. “He clearly didn’t hear ‘website,’ ” Williams, a writer and comic creator, told me. “He was like, ‘Wait, you all met on Black Planet? Like, there’s a planet that’s full of Black people? Why did you leave?!’ ”

Williams had to explain that they’d actually been right here on “regular Earth.” But in some ways, their son’s wide-eyed response wasn’t so off base: From the perspective of the 2020s, there is something otherworldly about the mid-aughts internet that brought his parents together. In a social-media era dominated by the provocation and vitriol of billionaire-owned mega-platforms, it can be hard to imagine a time when the concept of using the internet to connect with people felt novel, full of possibility—and when a site billed as the homepage of the Black internet had millions of active users.

BlackPlanet went live in 1999, nearly three years before Friendster, four years before MySpace, five years before Facebook, and seven years before Twitter. In those early years, the internet was still seen by many as a giant library—a place where you went to find things out. Sure, the web had chat rooms, bulletin boards, and listservs. But BlackPlanet expanded what it meant to commune—and express oneself—online.

The site offered its users the opportunity to create profiles, join large group conversations about topics such as politics and pop culture, apply to jobs, send instant messages, and, yes, even date. It provided a space for them to hone their voice and find their people. A visit to someone’s customizable BlackPlanet page would probably tell you where they grew up, which musicians they idolized, and what they looked like. “That now seems like the most obvious thing in the world,” Omar Wasow, one of the site’s co-founders, told me, “but at the time reflected a real break from the dominant ideas about how this technology was meant to be used.”

BlackPlanet is often overlooked in mainstream coverage of social-media history. But at its peak, it wasn’t just some niche forum. Despite skepticism within the tech industry that a social-networking site geared toward African Americans could be successful, about 1 million users joined BlackPlanet within a year of its launch. By 2008, it had about 15 million members. The site’s cultural reach extended beyond what numbers can capture: BlackPlanet amplified the work of emerging artists, served as a powerful voter-outreach hub for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign, and fostered now-prominent voices in contemporary media. Gene Demby, a co-host of NPR’s Code Switch podcast, told me he joined BlackPlanet while attending a predominantly white college as a way to make connections beyond his campus. “It was sort of like, ‘Give me all the Black people I can find!’ ”

The site and its users helped establish visual-grammar and technical frameworks—such as streaming songs on personal pages and live, one-on-one chatting—that were later widely imitated. BlackPlanet arguably laid the foundation for social media as we know it, including, of course, Black Twitter.

Now, nearly 25 years after its launch, looking back at BlackPlanet’s glory days can be more than just an exercise in nostalgia. Today’s social-media platforms often seem designed to reward the worst in humanity, subjecting their users to rampant hate speech and misinformation. Perhaps by revisiting BlackPlanet and the story of its rise, we can start to envision a different future for the social web—this time, one with the potential to be kinder, less dangerous, and more fun than what the past two decades have given us.

Omar Wasow met Benjamin Sun in the late 1990s, when they were among the few people of color working in New York City’s tech scene. After graduating from Stanford University in 1992, Wasow had moved back to his hometown and started a hyperlocal community hub and internet-service provider, New York Online, which he operated out of his Brooklyn apartment. The service had only about 1,000 users; Wasow made his actual living by building websites for magazines. So he was excited when he met Sun, then the president and CEO of the social-networking firm Community Connect, which in 1997 launched an online forum for Asian Americans called AsianAvenue.

Wasow, the son of a Jewish economist and a Black American educator, had been thinking about how to build community on the internet for years. Like many early tech enthusiasts, he frequented the bulletin-board systems (BBSes) that proliferated in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Spending time on those primarily text-based, hobbyist-run dial-up services helped him anticipate how popular social technologies could be. Many of the BBSes were standard tech-nerd fare—chats where users would discuss pirating software or gossip about buzzy new product releases. But two sites in particular, ECHO (East Coast Hang Out) and the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), modeled a more salonlike online experience that piqued Wasow’s interest. He realized that people didn’t necessarily want the internet to be just an information superhighway. They wanted connection; they wanted to socialize.

[From the October 2021 issue: Hannah Giorgis on the unwritten rules of Black TV]

Wasow admired the cultural cachet that AsianAvenue had already amassed—enough, by 1999, to compel Skyy Spirits to discontinue a print ad for vodka that featured a racist image of an Asian woman after the site’s users protested. Sun, for his part, wanted to expand Community Connect to new forums for other people of color. They decided to work together to build a new site that would allow users to participate in forum-style group discussions, create personal profile pages, and communicate one-on-one.

But Wasow, Sun, and the rest of the Community Connect team faced a major challenge in launching BlackPlanet: the perception that Black people simply didn’t use the internet. It was true, around the turn of the millennium, that white households were significantly more likely to have internet access than Black ones. At the same time, reports of this “digital divide” had helped foster a myth of what the media historian Anna Everett has termed “Black technophobia.” Well into the aughts, much of the coverage of Black American tech usage had a tone of incredulity or outright condescension. As a result, advertisers and investors were hesitant to back Wasow and Sun’s site. Would it really attract enough users to be viable?

Wasow felt confident that it would. The very first week it went live, in September 1999, a friend teased Wasow about the ticker on BlackPlanet’s homepage, which showed how many people were logged on at any given moment: “I logged in, and it said there were, like, 15 people online,” Wasow remembered him saying. “You sure you want to leave that up? Because it sort of feels like an empty dance floor.” By the next week, the ticker showed closer to 150 people. Every day, the number climbed higher.

Within a few months, BlackPlanet had so many users that they couldn’t possibly have squeezed onto any dance floor in New York City. Wasow began to spend much of his time speaking at marketing conferences and advertising events. Still, he and Sun struggled to attract significant capital. “Even as the site was showing real evidence of just incredible numbers, people had this story that was like, in some ways, ‘That couldn’t be!’ ” Wasow recalled. “Because the digital divide was the narrative in their heads … It wasn’t enough just to show success. We had to be insanely successful.”

By May 2001, less than two years into its run, BlackPlanet had more than 2.5 million registered users. Wasow himself had taught Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King how to surf the Net on national television (after learning how to use a mouse, the women responded on air to emails from Diane Sawyer, Hillary Clinton, and Bill Gates). BlackPlanet had secured advertising deals with the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Time magazine, and Microsoft. In the last quarter of 2002, BlackPlanet recorded its first profit. (Facebook, by contrast, did not turn a profit until 2009, five years after its launch, and Twitter didn’t until 2017, 11 years after its founding.) By then, it was the most popular Black-oriented website in America.

Wasow never forgot one seemingly trivial detail from BlackPlanet’s fledgling days. When the site went live, “the first person who logged in was ‘TastyTanya,’ ” he said, laughing. “For whatever reason, it’s now more than 20 years later and I still remember that screen name.”

I tracked down the woman once known as TastyTanya, who was 20 when she joined the site. Today, she’s a married mother of two young children who works in accounting; she prefers not to have her real name attached to her old handle. When we spoke, she recounted how strangers on the site would strike up conversations with her because someone called TastyTanya just seemed approachable. One man she met on the site even emblazoned her BlackPlanet profile picture onto a CD he burned for her and sent her in the mail, which didn’t seem creepy at the time. As quaint as that might sound now, TastyTanya’s experience perfectly illustrates what made BlackPlanet so fun. In its heyday, the site was largely populated by users just like her, people in their teens and 20s who were doing online what people in their teens and 20s have always done: figuring out who they want to be, expressing their feelings, and, of course, flirting.

[From the May 2024 issue: Hannah Giorgis on LaToya Ruby Frazier’s intimate, intergenerational portraits]

Like many early users, Shanita Hubbard came to BlackPlanet in the early 2000s as a college student, eager to take advantage of the dial-up internet in her dorm room. A member of the Zeta Phi Beta sorority at a historically Black college in South Carolina, Hubbard had heard about a cool-sounding site that would help her meet Zetas on other campuses. She chose the screen name NaturalBeauty79 and peppered her profile with references to her sorority, natural hair, and the music she loved. BlackPlanet soon became a fixture of her undergraduate experience.

Hubbard is now a freelance journalist and the author of Ride or Die: A Feminist Manifesto for the Well-Being of Black Women. When I asked her how she’d describe those days on BlackPlanet to a hypothetical Gen Zer, she laughed: “I feel like I’m trying to explain a rotary phone.”

In retrospect, she told me, it was her first experience understanding how technology could broaden her universe not just intellectually, but socially. On BlackPlanet, Hubbard befriended Black people from all walks of life, including Zetas as far away as California. “What we think Black Twitter is today is actually what BlackPlanet was eons ago in terms of connecting and building authentic community,” Hubbard said. “Except there was levels of protection within BlackPlanet that we never got on Twitter.”

Frank Dorrey

Some of the insulation was a product of the site’s scale and user makeup: BlackPlanet was both smaller and more racially homogeneous than today’s major social-media networks. Its infrastructure played a role too. Users could see who else was online or recently active, send private messages, and sign one another’s digital “guest book,” but group discussions of contentious topics tended to happen within specific forums dedicated to those issues, not on a centralized feed where bad-faith actors would be likely to jockey for the public’s attention. There was no obvious equivalent to the “Retweet” button, no feature that encouraged users to chase virality over dialogue.

BlackPlanet users talked candidly about politics, debated sports, and engaged in conversations about what it meant to be Black across the diaspora. A 2008 study found that the “Heritage and Identity” forum on BlackPlanet (as well as its equivalents on AsianAvenue and another sister site, MiGente), where users started threads such as “I’m Black and I Voted for Bush,” consistently attracted the highest engagement rate. The conversation wasn’t always friendly, but it was rarely hostile in the ways that many Black social-media users now take for granted as part of our digital lives. “There was never a time … where racists found us on BlackPlanet and infiltrated our sorority parties or flooded our little BlackPlanet pages with racist nonsense,” Hubbard said. “It’s almost like the white gaze was just not even a factor for us.”

Eventually, Hubbard began using the site for more than friendly banter. “Everyone likes to pretend it was all about formulating a digital family reunion,” she said. “That’s true. But that doesn’t tell the full story.”

In 2001, when online-dating services such as eHarmony were still in their infancy, BlackPlanet launched a dating service that cost $19.99 a month and helped members screen their would-be love interests. The site offered its members something that is still rare in online romance: Everyone who signed up for BlackPlanet’s dating service wanted to be paired with other Black people.

Soon enough, BlackPlanet romances were referenced in hip-hop lyrics and on other message boards, becoming a kind of shorthand for casual dating among young people. As Hubbard put it, BlackPlanet was “Tinder before there was swiping right, honey.”

If you wanted your BlackPlanet page to look fly—and of course you did—you had to learn how to change the background colors, add music, and incorporate flashing GIFs. At the height of the site’s popularity, the competition led some users to protect their pages by disabling the right-click function that allowed others to access their HTML codes. Giving users the opportunity to digitally render themselves made the site feel less like a staid old-school forum and more like a video game. That’s how BlackPlanet sneakily taught a generation of Black internet users basic coding skills, an accomplishment that remains among Wasow’s proudest.

Every former BlackPlanet user I spoke with for this story recalled doing at least a little coding, though most didn’t know to call it that at the time. Some told me they continued building those skills and went on to work in tech or media, at companies such as Meta and Slate. For others, though, learning HTML was just a way to express personal style. “We were our own webmaster, our own designer, our own developer,” Hubbard said. “We were maintaining it and then we would switch it up every couple of weeks to keep it fresh and poppin’.”

It wasn’t just BlackPlanet users who took note of how much fun customizing one’s own webpage could be. In late 2002, a man named Tom Anderson decided that he and his business partner should start a new social network.

When MySpace launched in 2003, the site included several features that were similar to the ones BlackPlanet had offered for years. But where BlackPlanet and the other Community Connect sites emphasized the value of shared heritage and experiences, MySpace billed itself as the universal social network. “I had looked at dating sites and niche communities like BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente, as well as Friendster,” Anderson told Fortune in 2006 (by then, he was better known as “MySpace Tom”). “And I thought, ‘They’re thinking way too small.’ ”

MySpace didn’t immediately cut into BlackPlanet’s user base. It would take at least five years and the advent of three more major social networks before BlackPlanet saw a significant downturn in its numbers. Even as late as October 2007, when then–presidential candidate Obama joined BlackPlanet, he quickly acquired a large following.

Still, as time went on, some BlackPlanet users found themselves visiting the site less frequently. Mikki Kendall, a cultural commentator and the author of Hood Feminism: Notes From the Women That a Movement Forgot, told me she didn’t spend as much time on BlackPlanet as some of her friends did in part because she thought of it primarily as a meeting space for singles. Also, its interface didn’t appeal to her. “BlackPlanet was both ahead of its time and unfortunately not far enough ahead of its time,” she said. The site was full of delays, and the mobile option seemed all but unusable. “I always felt like it was the bootleg social-media network, even though it wasn’t,” she added. “But it was run like somebody was in the back with a hammer just knocking things together and hoping it came through.”

Some observers I spoke with attributed BlackPlanet’s decline partly to the difficulty its founders had attracting capital. Wasow remembered Community Connect bringing in a total of $22 million by 2004. In 2007, Facebook received $240 million in investment funds just from Microsoft. “What does it take financially to get Facebook to where it is? How much money?” Charlton McIlwain, a professor at NYU and the author of Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, From the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, told me. How far into “the millions and into the billions of dollars has it taken for a Google to experiment and succeed at some things and fail at a lot of things, but then be a dominant player in that ecosystem?” Black American culture has always been a powerful engine of innovation, but this has too rarely translated into actual financial rewards for Black people.

In 2008, three years after Wasow left BlackPlanet to attend graduate school at Harvard, the Maryland-based urban-media network Radio One (now Urban One) purchased Community Connect for $38 million. At the time, BlackPlanet still had about 15 million users. But with Twitter slowly gaining attention outside Silicon Valley and Facebook beginning to overshadow MySpace, BlackPlanet simply didn’t have the resources to continue attracting the same mass of users that it once had. The rise of these social-media giants—and the industry-wide shift to prioritizing mobile experiences—decimated BlackPlanet’s numbers in the years after it was acquired.

Still, the site held on. In February 2019, BlackPlanet got a notable boost. That month, Solange Knowles released the visuals for When I Get Home, her fourth studio album, exclusively on the site. The project arose after Solange tweeted about wanting to release a project on BlackPlanet and caught the attention of Lula Dualeh, a political and digital strategist who had just started in a new role there.

“A lot of people were asking themselves the question What’s next outside of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram? ” Dualeh told me. Maybe the answer could be a return to BlackPlanet. In the days following the rollout of the When I Get Home visuals—a collection of art and music videos—BlackPlanet saw more traffic than it had in about a decade, as old and new visitors alike flocked to the site. Black Twitter was abuzz. “What I didn’t realize is that there was just this underbelly of nostalgia around BlackPlanet,” Dualeh said.

Despite the success of the Solange rollout, BlackPlanet hasn’t seen a significant, lasting bump in numbers. Nostalgia alone won’t be enough to keep users engaged—no matter how much worse Twitter (now X) has gotten. The BlackPlanet interface feels dated, with an early-2010s-Facebook quality to it, even as the posts crawling across the main feed reference music or events from 2024. Alfred Liggins, Urban One’s CEO, acknowledges that there’s work to be done on the technical side. But he argues that the site is still relevant. And although today’s BlackPlanet does often seem like a repository for WhatsApp memes, YouTube links, and conversation prompts copied over from other platforms, some users do continue to use it to share photos and reflections from their real life.

In the current internet landscape, talk of eliminating hostility from large, multiracial platforms feels idealistic at best—particularly when those platforms are owned by egotistical billionaires such as Elon Musk, who has used Twitter to endorse racist claims and alienate parts of its user base. Still, there’s reason to hope that we may be entering a new era of social networking that prioritizes real connection over conflict-fueled engagement. Several new microblogging platforms have launched in recent years. Spill, a Black-owned Twitter alternative co-founded by two of the app’s former employees, joins networks such as Mastodon and Bluesky in offering users a space that isn’t subject to the whims of provocateurs like Musk.

Wasow, for his part, is cautiously optimistic. The emergence of smaller, more dedicated digital spaces, he said, could “take us back to some of that thriving, ‘Let a thousand flowers bloom’ version of online community.” It’s not that he expects people to stop using the huge social networks, Wasow said, just that he can see a world where they log on to Facebook and Snapchat and Instagram less.

The emergence of these new outlets also serves as a useful reminder: The social web can take many forms, and bigger is not always better. The thrill of the early internet derived, in part, from the specificity of its meeting places and the possibility they offered of finding like-minded people even across great distances (or of learning from people whose differing perspectives might broaden your own). Not everyone is lucky enough to meet a future spouse on their web planet of choice. But the rest of us still have the capacity to be transformed for the better by the online worlds we inhabit.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “Before Facebook, There Was BlackPlanet.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

For the first several decades of my life, most of the meals I ate involved at least one piece of Tupperware. My mom’s pieces were mostly the greens and yellows of a 1970s kitchen, purchased from co-workers or neighbors who circulated catalogs around the office or slipped them into mailboxes in our suburban subdivision. Many of her containers were acquired before my brother and I were born and remained in regular use well after I flew the nest for college in the mid-2000s. To this day, the birthday cake that my mom makes for my visits gets stored on her kitchen counter in a classic Tupperware cake saver—a flat gold base with a tall, milky-white lid made of semi-rigid plastic. Somewhere deep in her cabinets, the matching gold carrying strap is probably still hiding, in case a cake is on the go.

If you’re over 30 and were raised in the American suburbs, you can probably tell a similar story, though your mom’s color choices might have been a little different. As more and more middle-class women joined the workforce, new products that promised convenience in domestic work, which largely still fell to them, became indispensable tools of the homemaking trade. Reusable food-storage containers kept leftovers fresher for longer, made packing lunches easier, and, when combined with the ascendantly popular microwave, sped the process of getting last night’s dinner back onto the table. Tupperware became such a dominant domestic force that its brand name, like Band-Aid and Kleenex, is often still used as a stand-in for plastic food-storage containers of any type or brand.

In theory, Tupperware should be even more popular now than it was decades ago. The market for storage containers, on the whole, is thriving. Practices such as meal-prepping and buying in bulk have further centered reusable food containers in America’s eating habits. Obsessive kitchen organization is among social media’s favorite pastimes, and plastic storage containers in every conceivable size and shape play an outsize role in the super-popular videos depicting spotless, abundant refrigerators and pantries on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. But Tupperware has fallen on hard times. At the end of last month, for a second year in a row, the company warned financial regulators that it would be unable to file its annual report on time and raised doubts about its ability to continue as a business, citing a “challenging financial condition.” Sales are in decline. These should be boom times for Tupperware. What happened?

[Read: Home influencers will not rest until everything has been put in a clear plastic storage bin]

The Tupperware origin story is a near-perfect fable of 20th-century American ingenuity. Earl Tupper, the product’s namesake, was a serial inventor who used mid-century advances in plastics technology to develop the first range of airtight food containers affordable for middle-class households. Tupperware debuted in 1946, but it didn’t really take off until a few years later, when Brownie Wise, a divorced mom from Michigan, began selling the stuff to friends and neighbors she invited to her home. Her success caught the attention of Tupperware, and then of women across America who had gotten a taste of the working life during World War II but had been displaced from their wartime jobs by men returning from military service. Many of them began selling the food containers to their friends and neighbors in the living-room showcases that became Tupperware parties.

In the following decades, the range of plastic tubs, matte and mostly opaque, expanded in color, shape, and size—1960s pastels gave way to the citrus oranges, goldenrod yellows, and avocado greens of the ’70s and ’80s, and then to the rich reds and hunter greens of the ’90s. Modestly sized lidded bowls were joined by dry-goods canisters, pie keepers, pitchers, and measuring cups. A kitchen full of Tupperware products became a symbol of social and domestic success: Practical but a little pricey, the storage containers were trafficked through women’s community bonds, and owning them telegraphed a commitment to order, cleanliness, and sensible stewardship of the family’s time and food budget. Particularly stylish moms matched their Tupperware collections to their kitchen decor.

Tupperware did not respond to an interview request on the company’s current woes, but the problems it faces are not difficult to see. The first is that, in a lot of ways, its products are still those products. Much of Tupperware’s range still looks at least a little bit like it did decades ago—textured, pliant plastic that obscures what’s inside. Some of these products are a clear nostalgia play to tempt younger shoppers with the retro, rainbow-colored bowls and tubs their mom used, but many of the products just look dingy, clunky, old. And nostalgia is not necessarily something buyers want in plastic kitchenware. Since Tupperware’s heyday, what we know about the safety of plastics that were commonly used in food storage has changed, and the public’s buying preferences along with it. Like most older plastic containers, Tupperware made before 2010 contains a type of chemical called BPA, which is associated with a host of health problems including infertility, fetal abnormalities, and heart disease. Tupperware has since removed BPA from its products, but on a visual level, many of them still appear to be the bowls you might now wish your mom hadn’t microwaved so frequently when you were a kid.

Tupperware’s competitors have multiplied in recent decades, and most of them have been more adept at signaling newness and cleanliness to customers. OXO, Pyrex, and Rubbermaid, for example, all sell popular lines of containers that use crystal-clear hard plastic or glass and have mechanical latches or seals to prevent spills and keep food airtight. They look neat and orderly—even expensive—in the bright, cool-toned LED lighting of modern refrigerators. At $50 to $80 for a modestly sized set, they actually tend to cost less than their Tupperware equivalents, which can top $90 for a set of basic plastic bowls. For buyers more concerned about price than beauty, Ziploc and Glad make sets of cheap, thin plastic containers that can be bought for $10 or $12 at most grocery stores.

Where exactly one buys Tupperware has also become an issue over time. The bulk of the company’s dwindling sales volume still comes from women selling to their social circles, which is now more of a liability in the United States than it was a generation or two ago. This type of “direct sales” model has proliferated widely in the social-media era, with distant Facebook friends pestering people to buy things like essential oils and cheap leggings. It has prompted a significant backlash, creating a consumer base that’s tired of sales pitches from acquaintances and suspicious of products sold in that format. Tupperware parties still work for the brand in some parts of the world, but for mainly the same reason that they worked in mid-century America: In 2013, Indonesia became Tupperware’s biggest market, thanks in large part to a growing population of workforce-curious women who embraced the opportunity to make some extra cash for their family by doing business with other women in tight-knit social communities. Sales in North America have continued to decline, and they now make up only a little over a quarter of the company’s total volume, according to its most recent annual report.

Instead of changing with the times, Tupperware has clung to its old ways for decades longer than it probably should have. The company brought in a new CEO late last year, and she has said she will modernize both the products and the company’s sales structure. But those efforts now seem likely to be too little, too late. Other than a brief dalliance with what were then called SuperTarget stores in the early 2000s, the brand didn’t make a serious push into traditional retailing until 2022, and its products are now stocked alongside more modern-looking and frequently less expensive competitors at Target and Macy’s. You can also now buy Tupperware online directly from the brand, but when you arrive at its website, a bright-orange banner across the top alerts you that you’re not shopping with a representative, in case you should want to remedy that and give a co-worker or neighbor the credit for whatever you buy.

None of these issues takes a keen retail or product-development mind to detect. Tupperware’s woes don’t seem to be the result of unpredictable market changes or fickle consumers. Instead, like many once-prosperous 20th-century American companies, Tupperware’s downfall appears to land squarely at the feet of its management. As far back as the 1980s, according to The Wall Street Journal, it was clear to executives at Kraft, then the company’s owner, that high workforce participation among American women was making the direct-sales model less viable; if women had full-time jobs, they mostly didn’t need side hustles or want to go to buying parties, even if they still wanted storage containers and kitchen gadgets. At the same time, Tupperware’s patents began to expire, which created new competition for a brand that had long had very little. At that time, the company still had decades of goodwill in front of it, and it had a direct line to an army of women who could have helped guide the company’s development of newer, better products that people would have been excited to continue stocking their kitchens with. Instead, those products are now made by its competitors and available virtually anywhere that food or home goods are sold. Tupperware, meanwhile, is still waiting for the return of a glorious past that is never coming back.

The ads do not meet the levels of disclosure Meta says it needs for AI-generated posts linked to India election.