Interesting quote from your link:

> Lazonick discusses how we evolved from a society in which corporate interests were largely aligned with those of broader public purpose into a state where crony capitalism, accounting fraud, and corporate predation are predominant characteristics.

On the contrary, aligning anyone's interests with those of the broader public is often against the natural state of things. There are many ways for groups of people, whether they're corporations or marauding bands of knights, to benefit at the expense of the broader public. In fact, straightforward theft, fraud, violence, oppression, slavery, monopolization, deception, sabotage, and other anti-competitive practices are historically among the easiest and most common ways to profit.

"Businesses thriving by creating value for everyone" is not a natural system. The only reason capitalism works at all is because we have a strong government that enforces laws and regulations to make most alternative forms of profit illegal. So of course we should expect an arms race, where businesses attempt to find loopholes where they can profit without creating value. The monetary incentives are too high for people not to try.

Lets not forget that in the natural state of things, I get to kill you and your family for the stuff you have, because I'm stronger and meaner than you. Then someone else does the same to be.

Nature doesn't love us, that's why we've spent so long killing it and getting away from it.

This logic only holds if you take an extremely narrow view of what constitutes self-interest. If you broaden that understanding to include the benefits we receive from wider social progress, then doesn't this chain of reasoning fall apart?

Can you explain further? I don't quite follow.

Aligning one's interest with the broader public makes sense because we are part of the broader public. What benefits the broader public benefits us individually, too.

Yes, but the inverse is not true: what benefits oneself doesn't necessarily benefit the broader public. And that's what matters when looking at individual behaviors.

Avoiding WWIII is in both companies and the publication intrest. Small companies tend to align closely with public interests except a few unique areas per business. It's really only large companies that have lots of points of divergence.

The major difference is a tiny company interacts with other companies largely the same way individuals do. Large companies have far more complex relationships.

> Avoiding WWIII is in both companies and the publication intrest.

So is avoiding ecological collapse e.g. by depleting all natural resources. Yet, for each actor individually, person or company, there are higher incentives to harvest from the commons. This is a called 'tragedy of the commons'. Most popular economic strategies and certainly most corporations act in their own interest.

In the case of Facebook and fake news, that means doing whatever yields more advertising revenue.

The article you site claims the maximizing shareholder revenue is not a legal obligation of corporation. It further observes that "we evolved from a society in which corporate interests were largely aligned with those of broader public purpose into a state where crony capitalism, accounting fraud, and corporate predation are predominant characteristics".

So the article you link to strengthens the point of the parent that facebook is not in business for the public good but for private interests that are strongly at odds with public interests.