[elmomle]

Here, Facebook was a medium designed for maximum dispersion of information among groups of people--remember the pious crusade, "connecting the world"?--which, when carried out to the point that waves of toxic, destructive information can propagate across that medium, is just an insane thing to unleash upon the world without some really rigorous safety measures. The problem is that Facebook intentionally optimized for virality and completely ignored, repeatedly and aggressively, critiques that not all information dissemination is inherently good.

I don't know if that is or is not corporate negligence, but we should consider it so. It is detrimental to humanity, and they have continued to try to ignore the immense responsibility that the world now finds them in hold of. If they cannot very quickly act as responsible stewards of this immense power, they should not be entrusted with it. That is how government has always worked, and guess what! Making infrastructure public so that it can be regulated, monitored and managed for the public good turns out to be a good thing. FB is social infrastructure and needs to either accept and act on their deep responsibilities or cease trying to be social infrastructure.