on wednesday can manipulate facebook to spread a distorted view of the world to millions of peoplewhat might be the next drama for facebookprivate facebook groups are a slow burning crisis in the making facebook and zuckerberg have seen that people are gravitating more to these smaller closed groups where extremism can flourish in secret and its harder to monitor and moderate zuckerberg has said private groups are the future of facebook and thats going to come with a host of problemsif you dont already get this newsletter in your inbox please sign up hereamazon slightly tames its wild westthe great thing about amazon is that it sells almost everything you might want thats also one of the most dangerous things about amazon and the company just showed that it knows this is a big risk for it and all of usyou might not notice this when youre shopping but most of the stuff sold on amazon doesnt come from the company itself but from a sprawling network of merchants large and dinky that set up shop inside amazons virtual mall this crockpot for purchase on amazon for example is sold by a merchant called txvdeals this one is sold by amazon itselfthese mostly unknown merchants give amazon a larger variety of products than it could ever stock and sell on its own they also create a dangerous wild westnumerous investigations have found that these merchants have sold thousands of unsafe sometimes illegal products including childrens toys containing lead companies complain that some of those sellers trick people into buying shoddy counterfeits or manipulate amazon reviews so we think products are better or more popular than they really areamazons critics say the company has done far too little to protect shoppers from the rogue merchants its a good bet that jeff bezos amazons chief executive will be asked about risky merchants when he and other big tech bosses testify at a congressional hearing later this monthamazon this week took a notable and overdue step that should slightly reduce the riskmerchants will soon be required to show their names and addresses on their amazon profile pages i know this doesnt seem like a big deal but until now merchants who sold on amazon in the united states although not in some other countries were able to shield their business information from the public that made it harder to hold those merchants accountable for bad behaviorsome merchants will still find ways to stay anonymous but this is a good and necessary baby stepthe question is whether amazon can keep the best elements of its sprawling merchant network while reining in the abuses that threaten to erode our trust in what we buy there its a tall orderbefore we go they encourage people to go from training wheels to driving motorcycles the trading app robinhood says it wants to make financial investing available to a broad group of people but my colleague nathaniel popper also found that compared to similar services people on