Earlier this month, a WIRED contributor managed to subvert all the warm, fuzzy feelings produced by the “10-year challenge” meme on social media by asking the question that has haunted free thinkers throughout history: Am I doing what I want to do, or what they want me to do?

The challenge, which has flourished on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, seems like harmless stuff, offering a forum for regular folks and celebrities alike to use photos to boast about getting better with age (or in the case of Mariah Carey, who posted the same photo as “before” and “after,” to deny the very notion of aging). But to Kate O’Neill, who thinks about how Silicon Valley is threatening our humanity, the idea seemed too perfect. Was the real purpose, she wondered, “to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition” by convincing millions of people to search for and publish pairs of photos separated by exactly 10 years?

Facebook swatted down O’Neill’s conspiratorial suggestion quickly and succinctly---in a tweet, no less: “The 10-year challenge is a user-generated meme that started on its own, without our involvement. It’s evidence of the fun people have on Facebook, and that’s it.” Conspiracy silenced. Except, politicians have a saying: “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants have been doing a lot of explaining lately. Explaining that they collect your data, but only because you’ve given them permission. Explaining how they don’t sell your data, but merely profit from it. Often, these companies find themselves explaining away contradictory criticisms, like the one that says right-wing commentators are singled out for punishment on social networks and the one from the left that insists those sites actually encourage right-wing extremism and conspiracies to increase user engagement.

These companies will then explain that because both sides think they're biased, they must actually be fair---which is nonsense, of course. One side could be right, and the other could be peddling false information. The only thing clear from both sides accusing you of mistreatment is that nobody trusts you.

This deep mistrust of Silicon Valley is the new reality, which means even a goofy meme isn’t safe from conspiratorial theories, and tech leaders can’t hide behind their quirkiness and supposed good intentions. A recent interview with Jack Dorsey in The Huffington Post was a train wreck of an encounter, as the interviewer, Ashley Feinberg, dismissed all the good will that Dorsey assumed traveled with him like a pair of Allbirds.

If Twitter believes that publishing what President Trump writes is inherently newsworthy, Feinberg asked, what if he “tweeted out asking each of his followers to murder one journalist, would you remove him?” The answer Dorsey landed on, after some hemming and hawing, “We’d certainly talk about it,” didn’t inspire much confidence. Similarly, after being asked, “Is there any situation at all in which you would decide to delete the site?” Dorsey defended Twitter by saying, “Should we just delete all the negative things in the world?”

What appeared most disturbing to Dorsey, however, was Feinberg’s questioning the appropriateness of his tweets during a meditation trip to Myanmar, which mentioned that his technique was to answer the question “How do I stop suffering?” In light of human rights violations in Myanmar, she asked if he saw “how your role is actually larger than just yourself?” Dorsey replied: “I do, but I’m not gonna change the practice because of it and what people say. Like, this is the practice that Buddha laid out, and I’m not going to change it just because I have this particular role. I’m sharing what I practiced and what I experienced.”