I realized we were doing another one of those articles when I hit "Others have decided that the real villains are Silicon Valley giants, especially Twitter, Facebook, and Google, for spreading fake news stories that vilified Clinton and helped elect an unpopular President."
That's not a Valley opinion, it's a traditional-media opinion. In my experience, Facebook and SV types more generally are acutely aware of how unhelpful and oversimplified the 'fake news' panic is. Facebook's "news" sidebar sucks, sure, but they can't actually stop people from sharing crappy, dishonest information back and forth. And the lines between fake and misleading and simply uninformed are blurry - anything that stops fake news will have people screaming censorship in a heartbeat.
This feels an awful lot like the usual gimmick of "SV is powerful, therefore all societal problems should be solved by SV - even the ones we blame it for!"
That's not a Valley opinion, it's a traditional-media opinion. In my experience, Facebook and SV types more generally are acutely aware of how unhelpful and oversimplified the 'fake news' panic is. Facebook's "news" sidebar sucks, sure, but they can't actually stop people from sharing crappy, dishonest information back and forth. And the lines between fake and misleading and simply uninformed are blurry - anything that stops fake news will have people screaming censorship in a heartbeat.
This feels an awful lot like the usual gimmick of "SV is powerful, therefore all societal problems should be solved by SV - even the ones we blame it for!"