Isn't Facebook wonderful? In a few short moments you can check on all your friends, learn what they had for dinner or lunch and see how they look in their Facebook pictures, as compared to real life. There's practically no need to ever talk to anyone outside the cyberspace, as is easily seen by noticing how people having dinner together are all staring into their own cell phones. Mmm. Alone together.
I'm not particularly fond of Facebook for all sorts of reasons, some personal but some political. Among the latter is the fact that Facebook is almost a worldwide monopoly in social media, that it's policies about advertising and news dissemination affect millions and millions, yet it's not viewed as a regulated utility or even held accountable in any meaningful legal sense. It doesn't have to check that the news it transmits are factual, and what can be posted on Facebook depends on what Facebook decides can be posted*, including Russian ads (fake news) intended to affect American elections.
We are still living in the lawless Wild West era (as depicted by movies) of online communication, and one day, perhaps, regulations will specify the rights and responsibilities of such "platforms" as Facebook and eBay and other cyber-firms which insist** that they are simply technical tools when it benefits them, which insist that they are marketplaces when it benefits them, and which insist that they are firms when that benefit them. But only social media firms will have to face the question whether they are direct political players or not. Right now one man, Mark Zuckerberg, wields enormous power over what information those who consume their news in the social media receive.
All this is uncharted territory.
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* Users can ask for certain pages to be removed, and Facebook will decide if that happens or not. Past campaigns by various organizations (including feminist ones) may have succeeded in making Facebook moderation a little better when it comes to outright hate speech, but it's not that difficult to open a new page when the previous one has been closed.
Then there are ghastly videos of murders and such. The New York Times wrote this last April, in the context of covering one murder posted on Facebook:
Now Facebook is facing a backlash over the shooting video, as it grapples with its role in policing content on its global platform.It is an issue that Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has had to contend with more frequently as it has bet big on new forms of media like live video, which give it a venue for more lucrative advertising.
Note the reference to "lucrative advertising." That's the firm-version of Facebook, the one which tries to make sure that you can't avoid seeing ads when you check what's happening with your friends and family.
Note, also, that Facebook moderates some postings only because it decided to do so.
** The cyber-firms are usually all of those things. We don't have a very good understanding of how such behemoths should be regulated or treated, what the long-run consequences of their power might be and so on.