Flacking for Facebook

From NYBooks.com April 13th 2021

It wasn’t always this way for Mark Zuckerberg. These days, we take almost for granted that when there’s organized political violence in the world, there will be an apparent Facebook connection—whether it involves groups and pages that played a part in fomenting the Capitol insurrection in Washington, D.C., or the social media incitement of genocide in Myanmar, where the military, which backed that effort to eliminate the Rohingya, has now seized power in a coup. These days, the platform is routinely associated in the public mind with secretive extremist hate groups, divisive foreign propaganda, sick conspiracy theories with cultlike followings, and forums for plotting armed uprisings against legitimate governments. Many critics have come to see Facebook itself as a threat to liberal democracy.

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