No, absolutely not benign.

Our democracy will function better if our populace is well informed about basic facts.

It's very possible both political parties propagate some of the same lies, or suppress the same inconvenient truths, because those facts don't reflect well on either party's policies.

We need to have a common set of facts to have a legitimate discussion about where we should go as a country. We can interpret facts differently, but the facts themselves should be concrete and real.

Probably, but there does seem to be a trend according to some.

Haven't taken the time to confirm myself, but John Oliver's team pulled out numbers where stories being surfaced on the right were false almost twice as much as those on the left, though he points out the numbers on the left are not insignificant which is obviously still worrying.

No - and even if it was, the bias is on the Trump side. As the BF review of 9 major news pages on FB showed:

- MSM: 99.3% mostly true or no factual content

- Left: 80.9% mostly true or no factual content

- Right: 62.3% mostly true or no factual content

This is just points on the number of articles though - there is then a major leverage effect where fake articles have higher virality, meaning the systemic bias on the right is significantly higher than the ~40% of published articles if you count eyeballs on the articles.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an...

According to one analysis 20% of left-wing news on facebook is obviously fake, while 38% of conservative news is obviously fake.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/partisan-fb-pages-an...

It's very polarizing. That seems like something US politics could use less of.

There is a systematic trend of polarization on Facebook. For example, if you engage with eaglerising "news", you'll see more of them in the future.