OK, fine. Let's really cut the bullshit, instead of pretending to read other people's minds. Let's see if we can have the discussion that seems to have been ski

OK, fine. Let's really cut the bullshit, instead of pretending to read other people's minds. Let's see if we can have the discussion that seems to have been skipped in all of this. * Is Facebook responsible for content published on its site? Legally, the answer is clearly no. Like everything from phone companies to bulletin boards, Facebook is legally considered a medium rather than an agent. But we all know (I hope) that legal != moral. So, morally, is Verizon responsible for what is said in phone conversations? Is Comcast responsible for what is said in conversations over the low-level internet? Can they be, in any meaningful or useful sense? Again, generally no. For them to act in that capacity would make them censors, or agents in some other more significant sense. That's exactly why many people objected to these fact-checking efforts in the first place. Blamed for doing nothing, blamed for doing anything. We as a society have defined a "common carrier" role for these situations. Why does Verizon get this status and Facebook not? What makes Facebook any different? Sure, there are obvious differences in terms of the connections are made, but how exactly does that justify different treatment? I'm not talking about Cambridge Analytica kinds of private-information stuff here. That's a whole different matter. I'm just talking about the stuff that people meant to share. Data comes in, data goes out, according to the senders' and recipients' own expressed preference for who they should be connected to. How is that really different than what a phone company does? If you can't answer that question with any level of coherency, all you're doing is hating. Personally, I am well aware of how badly these globe-spanning groups spreading fake news SUCK. But how do we distinguish them from other groups? I see plenty of groups that consist of real people who know each other in real life, deriving benefit from communicating and coordinating through Facebook. I see others that spread humor or support, even though they have many thousands of members who don't really know each other. Maybe it's not a great idea for every random idiot to have that big a megaphone, but how do we eliminate the bad without also eliminating the good? It's all too easy to say "kill them all" from a distance, when you're not among those who benefit from such connections, but being easy doesn't make anything right. The free-speech common-carrier answer to that central question is a valid one. I'm not convinced it's the best one, but it's valid. Just the medium, the messages are someone else's. There's a mental and legal model for that. If you think that's the wrong model, propose another. One that actually has some hope of working. Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter and Hacker News and other social media are part of how people interact. Not every malady is best solved by picking an organ to remove. Killing the medium is the lazy way out. Maybe we should try addressing the reasons or mechanisms by which that medium is being abused. If you succeeded in killing Facebook and the exact same thing happened on the next social network, and the next, and the next - as it surely would - what else might you try?