Brace yourself, the sky is falling. A few weeks back the Wall Street Journal published a series of stories on Facebook sourced by “internal documents” (easily accessible PowerPoint slides) obtained from a “whistleblower” (who revealed no illicit activity). Welcome to the Facebook Files, the most explosive story since Watergate, in which we discover such incredible scandals as influencers on the platform are treated differently than the average person, Facebook is having a hard time facilitating healthy conversations between strangers on the internet who disagree about politics, and Sheryl Sandberg’s massive team is not growing as quickly as a few smaller teams at the company. But one story really captured the hearts and minds of America: Instagram is making your teenage daughter want to kill herself, Facebook’s own research team discovered this fact, and Mark Zuckerberg buried the damning evidence. It’s Big Tobacco the Sequel — a bombshell — and an out of control industry is about to bring this horrifying new technology to small children.

Countless takes were published from every media institution covering tech, generating not only widespread condemnation, but a Senate hearing. According to the New York Times, in a breathless, triple-bylined piece, Facebook is now in total disarray, as evidenced by the fact that a handful of employees at the 60,000-person company were angry in a group chat. Further stories were teased, with new, damning information from the “whistleblower” to be revealed!, including smoking gun evidence of what tech journalists have known all along: Zuckerberg did the Capitol Riot. Facebook is a hostile foreign power wrote one Atlantic writer in the middle of the hellstorm, should we treat them like one? Yes, she said of treatment conceived of generally as including actual murder, absolutely. A weary journalist from the original bombshell series appeared on Meet the Press looking like a war reporter in a dispatch from Kabul. This was his Afghanistan.

I’m not sure if it was the zenith of media hysterics — one can only hope — but the story peaked last night on 60 Minutes when the “whistleblower” revealed her identity. She also rolled out her new career as a talking head, with an eerily-professional marketing push including a new Twitter account, website, and newsletter. She told us absolutely nothing we didn’t already know, then shared opinions the press already holds. Zuckerberg didn’t do enough to stop the riot on January 6th. Okay. January 6th was an insurrection. Interesting. Anger is engagement, and social media companies are therefore incentivized, just as is the press, to polarizing content. Great, we’ve been discussing this obvious, problematic fact for years, including the years before the internet existed. What exactly are we whistleblowing here? Where is the damning evidence that Zuckerberg is himself purposely polarizing the country, rather than struggling to navigate the complexities of the human condition, at odds as our impulses chronically and fundamentally seem to be with our own welfare, in an ongoing psycho press environment?