Facebook Thrives on Criticism of ‘Disinformation’

They’d rather be evil than incompetent

Published in

OneZero

9 min readSep 30, 2021

An old comic-book ad for hypnotic glasses; the lenses of the glasses have been replaced by the glowing red eyes of HAL9000 from 2001; in the bottom left corner, a comic drawing of a hypnosis master has been replaced with a drawing of Mark Zuckerberg. Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_(41793470192).jpg Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3

The mainstream critique of Facebook is surprisingly compatible with Facebook’s own narrative about its products. FB critics say that the company’s machine learning and data-gathering slide disinformation past users’ critical faculties, poisoning their minds.

Facebook Thrives on Criticism of ‘Disinformation’

They’d rather be evil than incompetent

Written by Cory Doctorow