海角大神

This week the social media giant everyone loves to hate turned 15. And like many adolescents, Facebook has a complicated relationship with trust.

Polls show that public trust in the platform has been . There鈥檚 a pervading sense that 鈥淚n Facebook鈥檚 maw, each of us became a new kind of surveilled and manipulated commodity,鈥� as told Vox.

And yet, despite a solid year of revelations highlighting just how much the platform has been eavesdropping on users and profiting from their data, Facebook reported continued growth in its Q4 earnings call last week, boasting more than in the United States alone.

There are many reasons people decide to stick it out with Facebook even when they have misgivings about the company鈥檚 actions, as Monitor writers Eoin O鈥機arroll and Noble Ingram explored in December.

But one reason that Facebook continues to grow is that, for all of the company鈥檚 misdeeds, the platform offers people something they crave: the promise of better connections to each other.

Perhaps Facebook鈥檚 biggest benefit to society these past 15 years was not connecting the world, but helping the world to see just how much it yearns to be connected.

Now onto our five stories for your Wednesday.