[DavidHm]

I find myself somewhat unimpressed by arguments like "Facebook / Google" should not be deciding what is false.

They already are - or rather, they are deciding what is visible and prominent, and what isn't. When you share a post, Facebook's algorithm determine what visible it has for each of your friends - whether it's on top of their feed, lower, or completely invisible.

At this point it seems more and more likely (though probably not proven) that those algorithms are skewed to promote content that gets high chances of engagement - and that means content that provokes outrage or rage is more likely to be visible than a long-form, balanced conversations.

So in short - Facebook is not (and should not) be the arbiter of truth. But surely it's not unreasonable to ask that they don't actively promote incivility and (literally, uncontroversially) blatantly fake news?

[moosey]

I imagine that, at some point, any specialized management of a 'social feed' will be considered human experimentation that generally leaves the people consuming it to be worse off mentally and emotionally. We already know that Facebook has done what are considered experiments against the wellbeing of users, but there is no real gap between that and trying to adjust the behavior of users in order to keep them on the site. Once that adjustment has been made, then a closed-source curated social feed becomes illegal, as it should be, IMO.

I think that the only way to manage a social feed is for it to be really dumb: blocks, maybe best friends, etc. Of course, once you do that you've basically returned to email.