Clearly it's impossible to detect agitprop with 100% accuracy. But I think they could eliminate 80% of the bad stuff with straightforward filtering. HN eliminates the great majority of the agitprop and outrage porn submitted with very simple heuristics. Human flagging eliminates most of the rest, though sometimes too late.

Eliminating 80% would improve the world's psyche considerably.

This entire topic feels like a "perfect is the enemy of good" situation.

What could Facebook do to improve news quality without censorship? It could just go back to what it already did with trending stories, before they fired their entire human-review team and then immediately started promoting objectively-false claims. It could even keep the algorithmic choices, and just pay for one media-savvy person per shift to skim the headlines and delete anything blatantly stupid.

To be fair, that sounds like a large swathe of the traditional media at large, certainly the British press. The assumption that 21st century People have an insatiable desire for exciting 24 hour news cycle, along with a platform for inane utterance (“social” media) are massively to blame too.