In other words, they are a syndicator.
In the physical world, syndicators remain accountable for what they publish through through their channels. They are not responsible for the material (given they didn't create or commission it), but they sure as hell carry the responsibility for letting the material propagate.
Incidentally, several years back I was talking to FB after they reached out. Visited their office for an informal chat and got to talk to couple of their senior(ish) engineering managers. I asked if they were doing, or planning to do anything like actually educating the users on their platform once they've identified someone having been subjected to propaganda or misinformation campaign. I said that I could imagine working on that type of project.
It's not often that you see a person physically recoil from an idea. "We don't do that!"
As far as I'm concerned, until FB actively fights not only the propaganda being funnelled through their machine, but also its effects on groups and individuals to undo the damage, the company is beyond redemption.
Just like tv channels optimize their content for TRP ratings and for ad sales, FB does the same – except its engagement optimization cycle is super-micro and super-fast and super-scalable and its ads are super-cheap and super-granular and super-micro.
Its the same business model followed by newspapers/magazines, other forms of content based attention grabbing and holding mechanism which make money through ads. The older business models are more coarse-grain in everything (cost, price, target size, targeting precision, time-cycles etc) and newer tech-enabled business-models are fine-grain everything.
Obviously, the same old social/behavioral/moral rules that worked (or didn't work, but didn't matter) at coarse-grain/slow-cycle/less-massive/more-local won't work (or needs to work better because it matters at scale!) at fine-grain/fast-cycle/huge/global levels. And the answer isn't obvious.
It is obvious same notions/rules/mechanisms won't scale (like content editorialship/moderation etc).
Facebook penetration in my country is so complete, I would wager there is absolutely no way to, say, successfully run for public office without at least maintaining an active Facebook page. This is why I say that Facebook must be destroyed. It is not acceptable that some company half the world away, based on American morals and American interests, gets to decide who can and cannot realistically get elected here.
In my experience when this argument is made, I typically follow it up by "well if it's so unimportant, why don't you delete your account?". 99/100 times I've asked this in real life the person responds by saying, "well I don't have anywhere else to say things" (this is during covid).
For the past two years, social media is the only public square allowed by government fiat. Thus it must be regulated as such.
Without the promises made on behalf of FB's tracking tech and the behavioural feedback loops they farm, the social features are basically worthless.
FB's problem isn't a 1st Amendment issue. It's the fact that it lies about the effectiveness of its ad tech to its advertisers, while also attempting to hide the toxicity of its behaviour mod techniques.
And there are too many parts of the world where it has monopoly status on both.
And that's completely irrelevant to my argument which is that, since Facebook is the only public square by government fiat, it ought to be treated as such regardless of how it got there.
When government exercises eminent domain for the public interest, it does not worry about why it is the house it is seizing was placed there. It just notes that the house is there and then takes proper action to secure it's future aims for public benefit.
What?
No, FB users talk to each other not to FB (the editor).
Quantity has a quality of its own - when size is huge it should be reclassified as public interest, not private. There should be mechanisms for people to ensure their voices matter similar to elections and parliament.