On the contrary, I think it is crucial for us to fight against websites selling audiences.
Fake news exists because they are able to sell ads on their pages, and they are profitable because they attract people, creating feelings, outrage, unreasonable reactions that feeds the pre-existing bias in the whole population.
Fighting these should be cutting their revenue streams. Google did just that, but it is a survival move so as to avoid precisely being in the blast of defense move that ought to be taken by citizens.
However, Google can and will only do the bare minimum for them to show that they somewhat care and that they are in control. They are starting a play of cat and mouse with people that can easily switch platforms.
> It's useless and a waste of time.
Ad-blockers are pretty effective there. If everyone used ad-blockers, fake news website would not have any revenue left, beside some marginal subscription streams. Evangelizing for ad-blockers, against Facebook, against Google and against analytics in general is an effective way to fight against these parasites.
> The time you spend blaming Facebook is the time you don't spend actually fixing what should be fixed : creating an healthy environment for debate.
The time I spend blaming all social networks is a time spent to better the Internet and fight against populisms at large. As for how to foster a healthy environment for debate, I'd quote Sartre:
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.
Replace anti-Semites, which were the populists of the pre-45 era, to whichever populism you want today, be it from the left or from the right. You cannot win with reason against them, because they speak to the guts and then explain that since they have popular support, they have already won. You cannot defend measure and reason because their main weapon is bipartism coloring things in black and white, and this will always be more popular than trying to explain things, to have some critical thinking.
Mass-media in general will always push forward this kind of gregarian thinking. Internet ought to be a way for us to build other ways to consume and produce, to share information. Facebook and Google and Amazon are building empires upon the ashes of the old world, effectively cutting the disruptive factor that Internet was introducing in its infancy. Fighting those mastodons is not vain, it is time spent actually fixing what should be fixed.