The moment Facebook stops trying to be the arbiter is the moment the government steps in and places heavy regulations on them.

Facebook's algorithmic outrage amplification is necessary to prevent an overbearing government from forcibly reverting parasocial norms to a simple chronologically sorted inbox?

A chronologically sorted inbox is the worst possible world for The Facebook. How can you boost user engagement with advertisers if you don’t use algorithms that repost years old stories of that time your dog died?

> A chronologically sorted inbox is the worst possible world for The Facebook.

As an aside, chronological sort key has been available in the previous designs, and the URL still works

www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

It has its limits of usefulness, though - some group admins moderate new posts in bulk once a day (if that), so depending on the time of visit you might be swamped with dozens of posts from the same group.

I don’t know exactly what you mean, but from a legal perspective, Facebook most certainly does not “own” anyone’s content by virtue merely of putting it in someone’s News Feed.

You didn't really give any legal perspective. Either Facebook owns the content and the liability as a publisher, or it's a platform and shouldn't fixing content towards what they want to show.

You're not making any sense. From a liability standpoint, there is no legal distinction between platform and a publisher.

You might be getting confused by the concept of a common carrier. Facebook is not a common carrier. It might be possible to amend the common carrier law to cover Facebook, but in the current political climate that seems unlikely.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/153

Facebook is not a common carrier, but enjoys liability protections under the CDA Safe Harbor:

47USC230(c)(1) "(1)Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

And definitions-- 47 USC 230(f)(3) The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.

Of course, CDA also excuses Facebook from making tilted or faulty moderation decisions in good faith.

You are mixing up two legal concepts: one is intellectual property ownership; the other is liability for republishing what others say. They are two different bodies of law: IP law (copyright/trademark) and tort law (libel etc.). They are analyzed under separate legal lenses.

Facebook can allow whatever they like on their website and it is perfectly legal. I would rather they filter out 98% of the tripe with a 2% fail rate (sorry BJM!)

You'd think so, but in doing so you've just imagined the world's most terrifying propaganda tool.

Exactly, let’s not forget that any story that refers to Taiwan being an independent country is marked as “fake news” in some parts of the world which has a chilling effect.

Why do we assume our own governments will also be immune from the same temptations?

They're not. Israel has the Hasbara team. KSA has the "lord of the flies" troll farm. Britain has the 77th Brigade, Bellingcat, and the Integrity Initiative. But by far the best is Operation Mockingbird.

As just one example, take Hunter Biden's laptop before the election. This got memory-holed so fast, half of America doesn't know it exists, and 2/3rds of the rest believe the 50+ intelligence agents who immediately said, with no proof, it's Russian disinformation. This was epitomized by the reporter who said, -even if the laptop is true-, the press must treat it as disinformation.

One doesn't know what one doesn't know.