> iPods were transactional products that could be filled with legal music, pirated music, podcasts, music of one’s own creation — it didn’t matter to anyone but the iPod’s owner. Apple sold a product that benefited from openness into a relatively lawless market and reaped the rewards [1].
Social media is largely a lawless market, and FB (amongst others) is reaping the rewards. In the case of the iPod, government regulation was the bandaid, and the cure was a new incumbent: streaming music services. Importantly, streaming music was only afforded by advances in mobile/wifi tech. So how is this like fake news in social media -- what are the analogies here? Again we’ll see government regulation with minimal effect, as noted in this WSJ article. And should there be a solution to FB’s propaganda problems, my bet is it’ll come from a service that alters the means by which we share (social) experiences online, just as the ability to stream music replaced the need to download it. What's more, the solution will likely come from outside the walls of FB.
FB will tread on though, just like Apple, by embracing the novel tech; the iPod was supplanted by the iPhone, leveraging external streaming music services like Spotify and Pandora. So it's not exactly "who will rein in FB?" but rather "what". What technology will give us new means by which we interact with social media? There are dozens of ideas, but the billion dollar one will be that which eradicates the spread of propaganda, just as streaming services eradicated the dependence on pirated music a decade ago.