Meta's Monopoly Made It a Fair-Weather Friend

> a lack of competition allowed the company to shift its focus away from users—and toward its bottom line

Competition or lack there-of had fuck all to do with it. Meta was always focused on it's bottom line and never gave a damn about it's users beyond what value they could extract from them. It certainly was never your "friend", fair-weather or otherwise. Just because their marketing and PR tried to tell you otherwise didn't mean it was indicative/authentic to their actual corporate/internal ethos.

Couldn't find this on Internet Archive but if you set your user agent to something that looks like google's crawler you can get past the paywall. It's easy on Safari if you already have the Develop menu enabled.

Develop > User Agent > Other...

Then use:

Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Safari/537.36

Note that this works for most paywalls, not just Wired.