[grandalf]

My take on it is that once a few non-techie people realized that Donald Trump's provocative statements were actually a strategy for controlling the news cycle via social media outrage, the focus turned to social media companies in the form of "how could you build a system that let this happen?"

So Facebook had to figure out a way to seem relatively innocent. It had been the major vector by which 10 minute wordpress articles with Times New Roman font face hosted on $10 fake news domains got thousands of shares. So it tabulated the amount of ad spend that had occurred in Russian currency and admitted that $160K of ads had been purchased by Russian actors.

Twitter realized that rather than reveal that a massive percentage of its accounts are bots, it ought to follow Facebook's lead, so it did a similar thing, canceling a small percentage of the fake accounts.

Yes, Google may have felt some pressure, but Google has a much better alibi. Pagerank is based on linking behavior which is much slower than social media, and is not designed simply to promote virality.

Imagine if pagerank worked like Facebook's algorithm, search would be useless but people would stay highly engaged while trying to search amid distracting and emotionally potent items turning up that they weren't actually looking for.

You are making the defense of Schmidt that some people make about IBM's selling equipment to the German government pre WW2.