After the 2016 elections, critics blamed Facebook for undermining American democracy. They believed that the app's algorithmic News Feed pushed hyperpartisan content, outright fake news, and Russian-seeded disinformation to huge numbers of people. (The U.S. director of national intelligence agreed, and in January 2017 declassified a report that detailed Russia's actions.) At first, the company's executives dismissed these concerns'shortly after Donald Trump won the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg said it was 'pretty crazy' to think that fake news on Facebook had played a role'but they soon grew contrite. 'Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it,' Zuckerberg would say 10 months later. Facebook had by then conceded that its own data did 'not contradict' the intelligence report. Shortly thereafter, Adam Mosseri, the executive in charge of News Feed at the time, told this magazine that the company was launching a number of new initiatives 'to stop the spread of...
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