“Latent violence in organizations of all sorts may be difficult to see, especially when it is decoupled from the organization's advertised message. Facebook originally presented itself as a smart and fun-loving platform to connect broad networks of people. By providing this service for free, the platform reflected an early characterization of the internet as a democratizing force that made the world more information-rich through exchange. Able to tailor their communications, families and specialized groups could make those connections even more meaningful or instrumental for organizing everything from support groups to political activism.
But in the campaign to be dominant and capture as much market share as possible, Facebook and other platforms introduced a consequential binary. The "like/dislike" and "friend/ unfriend" filters—not just a reflection of social inclusion or exclusion—allow the company to sell data about trends and preferences. Likes can be used to exaggerate the differences between groups and sharpen the weapons of discord and hate between them, as they were in the 2016 election interference mentioned earlier. But, remarkably, debates about the situation continually return to conundrums over free speech rather than targeting the monetizing binary that artificially exaggerates that speech.”