I have a very tangential question to this situation prompted by some conspiracy theories linking the outage to today being Super Tuesday election day in the US.

I have a very tangential question to this situation prompted by some conspiracy theories linking the outage to today being Super Tuesday election day in the US. Why does Facebook need sharing news media or political ad targeting on its platform from a business point of view? Am I being naive or is it really such an important revenue driver to the business or the core experience of the app? I think it is the source of enormous reputational damage and risk, that if I was running the company I would even happily trade 10% if not more of the market cap to removing any feature that enables news sharing on the platform. Actually if you remove these two things (political ad targeting and commenting on news media) I struggle to find any other issue that would make facebook a "political" target, they can literally shutdown the fake news division that employs 10,000 people...