[beachy]

If I was a higher up at FB, I'd consider the risks to me as a business of these issues of polarization, and I'd spend according on advice and evaluation (a lot).

For example, if FB comes to be seen as a kind of mind control platform, that could be devastating as national govts decide to step in and put a stop to things. Imagine even a mid-sized country regulating that FB was responsible for tagging any posts that contained not just Covid-19 misinformation but all sorts of misinformation. That sort of thing could be extremely dangerous to FB's business model.

These sorts of risk in my mind would be very high indeed and I would devote a lot of resources to at the very least understand them. $2M is a drop in the bucket for a company with revenues of $70B for addressing such risk.

(Actually I checked and a bucket contains approx 10K drops, so this is actually surprisingly close to being a drop in the bucket).

[disgruntledphd2]

This already exists, in Singapore. See for example: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-50613341