Why Facebook doesnt follow the First Amendment

Programming note: Zoe and I are both on assignment this week, and The Interface will be off Thursday while we work on some special reports. The silver lining is that Monday’s issue will be very long!

Yesterday here we talked about whether politicians should be able to lie in their Facebook ads. I argued that they should be: Facebook ads are public and searchable, and if a politician or political party is out there telling lies, that seems like an important and useful thing for a democracy to know about. Facebook is big and its CEO is unaccountable to any electorate, and so I would rather the company not referee political speech.

Many readers see things differently, though, so I wanted to air out a few of your takes.

The most common...

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