[jboy55]

Yes, that was my point, that in 2016, actors were using the feed and ad algorithms to influence the elections. The point I'm trying to make is that isn't what is happening now.

Now we are seeing a large group of people freely sharing misinformation amongst themselves. The fueling of this, I would argue, is outside of facebook and is being brought there by the people themselves.

It was really easy to blame the lowering of the level of discourse to social media. However, the "our side at any cost" has its modern seeds in the advent of right wing radio with Rush Limbaugh, followed by the rise of fox news. With the internet, the public has learned that they too can be players in the political landscape by commenting on news articles. All of which predates the rise of social media to a large extent. In the early 2000s, Yahoo News political articles would have 10s of thousands of comments, even now, the 2020 election market on predictit had 300k comments on it, of people posting memes and s*t talking to each other.

This is the culture now. To change this, you can't go and regulate a social media company, you have to change the culture.

[staticautomatic]

Both are still occurring. Either way there are lots of things to dislike about FB but enabling speech isn’t one of them. Mis- and Disinformation are political problems to which democracies are highly susceptible, by design. They’re features, not bugs.