From The Propaganda Professor:
It seems nobody is very happy with Facebook these days. And heaven knows, there is plenty of reason for the disenchantment. The social media titan has become a contemporary Frankenstein story, a case of technology that began with benign intentions but morphed out of control and has become a destructive monster — or more like a massive army of destructive monsters. What was once a channel to keep people in touch with each other and facilitate the sharing of experiences and information has become a seedy and devastating conduit for disinformation that seriously threatens whatever is left of democracy.
The following meme, which has made the rounds repeatedly, is a good indication of the kind of malfeasance that takes place regularly on Facebook:
Have you ever known a Muslim to say they were “offended” by the American flag? Have you ever known a “liberal” to say such a thing? But the people who share this meme accept both propositions as indisputable fact; thus, the meme stirs up hatred toward two groups simultaneously — under the pretext of shoring up patriotism. And quite often, the false information passed along consists of more specific misrepresentations of fact — i.e., relating a phony incident in which some Muslim supposedly disrespected the flag. (Meanwhile, social media and regular media have ignored or glossed over the fact that an American sailor who died trying to stop the gunman at a navy base in Pensacola was himself a Muslim.)