Facebook Cares About Fake News

The central message of the film is that Facebook really does care profoundly about false news. The company was slow to realize the pollution building up in News Feed, but now it is committed to cleaning it up.
Not only does Facebook care, it’s got young, dedicated people who are on it. They’re smart, too. John Hegeman, who now runs News Feed, helped build the Vickrey-Clark-Groves auction system for Facebook advertising, which has turned it into one of the most profitable businesses of all time.

See? It’s like if the LAPD was shocked, SHOCKED I say, to discover police brutality was real, so they appointed Daryl Gates to oversee human rights. (My other considered analogies went even further into war crimes territory)

Facebook sells ads. Lurid yellow journalism and propaganda from Republicans and their foreign owners buy those ads. Facebook promotes those ads to make more money. Putting the ad guy who made this shit happen in charge of cleaning it up is (more war crimes analogies).

WIRED was always the slick advertising/design corporate sellout end of cyberpunk ‘zines, as opposed to the sex-and-drugs-and-wires end of Mondo 2000, or the neurotic basement h4xx0rz of 2600. But even for WIRED, this is an unusual level of corporate fellatio.