Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

The social-media giant internally studied how it polarises users, then largely shelved the research. In the last five years, Facebook has been under fire for making the world more divided. Calls for internal investigations on how the company handles hate speech in its platform are frequent. Remarkably, however, as Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman point out in The Wall Street Journal, such inquiries have in fact been made, and shelved by its executives. Here, they explore why.