In David Kirkpatrick's book The Facebook Effect, which was basically the positive counterpart book at the time to Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, Kirkpatrick talks on the first few pages how Facebook's viral and collaborative social network allowed for protests and eventually political revolutions to be organized in various countries. He says that one guy was so thankful for Facebook that he named his own child with the name Facebook.

If Facebook back then was lauded for enabling online communication in a way that wasn't possible before that led to political revolution for certain nations, it is ironic that these journalists are complaining about Facebook killing their click count by taking their official pages out of the mainstream feed. Taking their official pages out of the mainstream feed perhaps brings Facebook closer back to the Facebook that Kirkpatrick wrote about. This leads me to wonder whether the journalists are worried about political freedoms or really their income while raising the banner of political freedoms. The fact of the matter is that if Facebook indiscriminately removes these pages from the mainstream feed, they'll remove "good" pages, but they'll also remove "bad" pages (and let's not even get into which news media are "good" and which are "bad").

Today, we can see that Facebook is like any other technological product: it is amoral and can be used for "good" and "bad". Even though Zuckerberg now concedes that Facebook may have had a part to play in Trump's election, an idea he at first thought was nonsense, and even though he now makes overtures of wanting to help ensure elections around the world are fair (where a private American organization may or may not even be the right party to do this), Zuckerberg in fact does not have much ability to control what happens on his network. At a fundamental level, Facebook is about online social activity. Even if he manages to successfully ban politically manipulative ads (and which ads aren't?), bans fake accounts with amazing accuracy, and gets reviewed by government committees for political ads the way television and radio get reviewed, Facebook cannot survive without the lifeblood of its members engaging in online social activity. It would not be easy to ban all the "bad" people if there are a lot of "bad" people who still "deserve" their freedom of political speech. So there will likely always be an attack surface for some smart strategist to take advantage of Facebook and spread ideas maliciously and manipulatively.

Pandora's Box has been opened, and it's not going to get closed again. And if people mute those they don't like, then all it does is increase individual echo chambers, which in turn then increase political polarization.

If technology is amoral and can be used for both good and bad, depending on the user, we should have seen this future coming from a mile away. But we didn't, I certainly didn't. It's funny how all the lessons from 1984, Brave New World, and all the other classics have come true in so many ways. Not sure if there was a book that warned about this type of future discussed in these comment threads, but anyway. I should have seen it coming and not sure why I didn't. So we'll live in an era where information and misinformation seem to become one.