In 2016, when Facebook was charged with hosting "fake news", their response should have been "It's your fault for believing everything you read on the internet."
When Facebook replied, "We accept responsibility, and we will do better", they spelled their own doom.
I disagree, it's our fault as a society for not allocating proper resources towards education. You can't expect people to understand critical thinking, media/source analysis, etc. if no-one ever taught it to them.
Now, Facebook capitalized on that societal failure point and developed an algorithm that exploited individuals who lack that critical thinking skill by shoving progressively angrier and more unhinged content in front of their eyeballs, and recommending them groups of extreme individuals, therefore normalizing their way of thinking. They did this because they realized content that causes anger, outrage, and fear is extremely effective at keeping people clicking, scrolling, reading, and overall "engaged" which means more data, more ads shown, more money. They basically took the Fox News model and injected pure racing fuel into it.
This, like most issues, cannot be explained by one specific cause, but Facebook absolutely shares the blame.
It sounds good and is an intuitive concept but it's not enough to rely on critical thinking.
IT’S HARD TO DETERMINE the extent to which Facebook caused this hyperpartisanship or simply stumbled into it. Did Facebook cultivate more extreme beliefs or simply take what was already simmering and thrust it into the open?
Mr. McGee argued that he always thought this way. Before Facebook, he said, he watched conspiracy-laden videos on YouTube. Facebook merely helped him find his people.
“People are engaging me, encouraging me to share what I think, but these are the inner workings of my mind,” he said. “I’ve been feeling this way for years. That’s why it’s so easy for me to make posts, because I’ve been suppressing this stuff forever.”
And yet when he talks about Facebook, he focuses on algorithms and optimization, not community or ideology. It’s worth considering: Would he be attempting to influence others so forcefully without Facebook’s incentives?
Why does the responsibility never lie with the people who say these things, only where they say it? It reminds of of the Columbine shootings, where many articles where written about the violent video games that must of inspired the shooters to do it. Those arguments sucked then and they still suck now.