https://medium.com/@sebastianzimmeck/social-debt-why-software-developers-should-think-beyond-tech-df665d8401a5

Software developers can borrow time: a company that is willing to take on technical debt¹ can speed up its development process. However, the debt has to be paid back eventually and quite possibly with substantial interest. For the longest time Facebook’s motto was to move fast and break things. This approach can only go so far, though. At some point its user interface required a major rewrite. Icons kept popping up notifying users that they had 99+ messages. Except, in many cases it was not true. To address this and other problems Facebook developed React, a JavaScript library and possibly the gold standard for user interface development. It took serious efforts to fix, but Facebook was successful. Albeit, it did not only accumulate technical debt. Over the years, it also accumulated social debt.²

Just as many other technology companies, Facebook has both a broad view into society as well as a microscopic perspective of individual users’ lives, interests, wishes, and other personal details. Acting upon this knowledge can have social implications that go far beyond Facebook. Whether it is Russia exerting influence over the presidential elections or the dubious activities of Cambridge Analytica, bad actors can mislead and polarize communities. However, traditionally Facebook and other technology companies have focused on building technologies. They were not concerned with social implications. This narrow view is difficult to sustain today. By now, many social networks, mobile applications, and ride hailing services — among others — are mainstream technologies. They are used at scale, and, thus, their social implications will emerge sooner or later for broader populations. If those implications are not resolved immediately, companies will accumulate social debt. That is what happened to Facebook. Social debt is not inherently bad. However, just as technical debt is incurred over time, social debt will continue to build up as well. At one point or another social debt has to be paid back. Otherwise, just as in the case of technical debt, “[e]ntire engineering organizations can be brought to a stand-still under the debt load […].”¹