[scarejunba]

Exactly. Facebook is a convenient scapegoat because people can't simultaneously hold in their head the two concepts "My grandfather is loving and kind and good to his family" and "My grandfather hates Mexicans and gay people". An easy way to resolve this is "Zuckerberg deceived him!".

[ordinaryradical]

I think this misses that it's easy to type some of the nastiest things you can imagine into a comment prompt, but it is substantially harder to set up a box on a college campus and shout them through a megaphone, particularly when you start getting nasty looks, jeered at, or harrassed.

Facebook is the perfect outlet for every dingus who thinks themselves transgressive for having a cruel opinion or two but who can't handle the the cost of social ostracism.

This outlet reinforces and radicalizes beliefs gradually because there is no obvious "cost" or "censure" for saying horrible things about your fellow man except, perhaps, being unfollowed. The most unwell in our society use sites like facebook and 4chan and particularly their say-anything mechanism as incubators for their paranoia and rage and then go kill people. There's an obvious cause and effect here, even if the person was unwell prior to engaging with the site.

So, no, it's not Facebook's fault that people think and say this stuff, but it has created a mechanism to amplify it. And the design of the system, driven by "engagement" (aka addiction), creates a negative feedback loop. The more awful something is, the angrier we get, the more we engage, comment, argue, and the higher it climbs in the feed.

They are definitely responsible for this algorithm, at the very least.

[opportune]

It’s the same with the Russians thing, people would rather talk about the Electoral College or foreign election interference instead of the fact that 49% of people voted for someone they abhor. Although in this case it’s less about an individual and more about the state of the general population