Facebook’s core news feed product, where news and information could so specifically be targeted to users’ interests, also seemed to have a tremendous downside. You couldn’t know what someone else saw when logged onto Facebook, what shaped their reality. Some people were selling illegal drugs; some people were getting radicalized by the Islamic State; some people were not people at all, but bots trying to manipulate public conversations. Only Facebook had the power to understand and police it all—and they weren’t.
