This reminds me of a recurring conversation I've had with relatives, in which I try to explain to them that Facebook isn't a person. It's not a media company with an editorial staff. It's not a company like anything we have seen before. It has billions of users. Trillions of posts, photos, videos and sundry other content. Thousands, possibly millions, of advertisers.

If a person breaks a promise to you, he's a lying liar who lies. If Facebook recommends a political group to "at least 3 people," that's not a broken promise. That's an amazingly effective tweak to the recommendation algorithm. The same goes for all sort of claims people make about Facebook:

  - You were paid in Rubles! (It's not like there was a salesman that should have been suspicious. Facebook gets paid in Rubles *all the time* because they have millions of Russian users and many, many Russian ad customers. No human looked at the ad before it went up.)

  - You're allowing people to post hateful things! (Again no human reads all the posts. There are people that review a tiny percentage that have been flagged for one reason or another, but they'd have to employ a sizable percentage of the world's population to review everything.)

  - You're censoring conservatives! (Same thing, nobody is checking the political affiliation of posters before allowing posts to go up.)

The fact is, this thing has never existed before, and basically no human inventions have reached this many people before, and it's frigging hard. Zuckerberg and the rest, are making it up as they go.

All that's not to say that Facebook is awesome and the criticism is unwarranted. I personally don't use Facebook anymore for all the usual reasons. We should absolutely be talking about the role of social media in society, and how it's really warped public discourse, polarized the polity etc. But "it's easy, if you would just do this one thing, everything would be peachy" is absolutely the wrong conclusion and people seem to insist on reaching it every damn time Facebook comes up.