Cultural Moments Product

The Cultural Moments product sat at the top of the Facebook newsfeed — visible to every one of the platform's two billion users simultaneously — and was designed to unite the platform around shared cultural and civic experiences. The strategic problem it posed was deceptively simple: which moments qualify?

At two billion users, every decision about which cultural moments deserve top-of-feed placement is implicitly a statement about what the platform considers universal. A moment that feels unifying in one country is politically charged in another. Choosing wrong — in either direction — produces backlash at a scale that very few brands ever have to manage.

I developed the cultural strategy and engagement framework: which moments qualified, how participation was structured, and how the product design made engagement feel like genuine expression rather than platform-manufactured sentiment. That judgment, applied at two billion user scale, is one of the less visible but more consequential forms of editorial work that happens inside a platform.

Facebook needed a principled framework for deciding which cultural and civic moments deserved to be elevated to the top of the newsfeed for two billion simultaneous users. Every selection was implicitly a statement about what the platform considered universal — with consequences at a scale most organizations never face. The failure mode on either side was significant: too restrictive and the product feels irrelevant; too expansive and the product becomes a political liability.

I developed selection criteria principled enough to withstand scrutiny across political contexts and flexible enough to apply across cultures and calendar systems that don't map onto each other neatly. I built the engagement framework so participation felt like genuine expression rather than platform-manufactured sentiment. The work required understanding not just what a moment was but what it meant — to whom, in which context, with which history behind it. That is editorial judgment applied at platform scale.