When it was started Facebook served a useful social service in allowing families and friends to keep up with the people dear to them.  So far so good.  We all know people for whom Facebook is an important part of their lives.  These people far outnumber the wreckers, trouble-makers, haters and liars.

Recently, however,  Facebook and other “social” networks have been adopted by the latter, spreading baseless lies without a shred of evidence and undermining social cohesion and democracy.

The problem is that those baseless lies are uncritically believed by millions (12 million to be fairly precise) who don’t require anything to be true, just that the content suits their skewed world outlook. Result:  the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which finally moved Facebook to ban the most egregious of liars for disinformation, abuse, and hate speech.

Facebook has created a new Oversight Board, accountable only to Mark Zuckerberg, not the public, that will review decisions on who to ban and for how long. That means that Facebook will still be unaccountable to the public.  It already has rules against sharing inaccurate voting information, spreading election disinformation, and incitement to violence  — it needs to enforce them, reverse the policy of not fact-checking political ads, and immediately close the loopholes that far-right militias exploited to organize  insurrection on Facebook in plain sight.

If Facebook doesn’t listen to the law- abiding and sane and start enforcing its own civic integrity policies, it will need government  action to  protect our democracy and hold them accountable.

My own view, for what it’s worth, is that Facebook et al does more harm than good in any case (see stories about unhappy teenagers), and ought never have been invented, along with other socially undermining things on the internet. But then I suppose I do believe in free speech.  I was just to naive to believe that it couldn’t do so much harm.