Facebook to let users turn off political adverts

Sure, this is a fair exception. FB has decided that it does not want to be a porn site. We may all disagree with that decision, but it's theirs to make.

> lies about non-political topics

Can you elaborate on this? It is 100% possible to post non-political lies on FB. The only exception to this is libel/defamation and false advertising, but that's for legal reasons. And even there, you can only sue for material damages incurred, and cannot simply sue for the speech in question (which is itself protected).

To the extent that FB wants its platform to contain political ads (factual or otherwise), it's because they subjectively see value in a global platform for users to decide for themselves what is true and what is false. You may argue that this is bad for society/bad for democracy, which is fair. Facebook clearly seems to disagree with that, which is also fair.

Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

NYT sits pretty much center left, but feel free to point towards a more comprehensive study.

Echo chambers always did, but I think the bubble-forming dynamic we have now is a bit different. It's not that I have my own views echoed back to me by the communities I'm in all the time, it's that so much of my exposure to opposing views is often coming from some of the dumbest and most unhinged people on Earth. It's the filtering for nutcases more than echoing back confirming views that seems to be the issue.

It's really easy to believe that certain perspectives are only held by insane people if the only people you see speaking for them happen to be insane. And even if they're not crazy, normal people aren't really going to be interested in communicating nuance or understanding if they're hastily firing off a missive during a toilet break.

There's a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of the big ones is that our intellectual institutions have given themselves over to internet troll logic, including many prestigious Op-Ed pages. In the past you might have encountered plenty of nuts, but you could also see similar enough versions of their ideas being advanced by people who could construct an argument that didn't rest entirely on motivated reasoning, and include enough nuance so as to not be monstrous. But at this point, many professional opinion havers aren't any better or more cogent than a regular Twitter troll. It's mostly just Frankfurtian bullshit all the way down.

Drezner actually has some really good ideas about the replacement of "public intellectuals" with "thought leaders" that touches on this dynamic. https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-h...

>The rich have, Drezner writes, empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.” Whereas public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky or Martha Nussbaum are skeptical and analytical, thought leaders like Thomas Friedman and Sheryl Sandberg “develop their own singular lens to explain the world, and then proselytize that worldview to anyone within earshot.” While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.” Many readers, Drezner observes, prefer the “big ideas” of the latter to the complexity of the former. In a marketplace of ideas awash in plutocrat cash, it has become “increasingly profitable for thought leaders to hawk their wares to both billionaires and a broader public,” to become “superstars with their own brands, sharing a space previously reserved for moguls, celebrities, and athletes.”