What are you trying to say? That Facebook should be excused because others also behave badly?

Otherwise, we can dislike both things and it adds nothing to say "but why aren't your talking about the other thing instead". And for what it's worth, there is a pretty clear difference between the journalistic standards of FB bait and of the legacy media.

One big difference is regulation and algorithms. All viewers/readers see the same content in traditional media, and they’re all subject to scrutiny by government regulators (however effective or not they may be).

Social media networks display different things to different people so it’s borderline impossible to know exactly what they’re even showing. That makes regulation extremely difficult.

More broadly, this perspective depresses me. I’m old enough to remember the promise of the internet when we first all got it: that it would democratise information and we’d be able to break free of the issues with traditional media. Fast forward to today and we’re asking “why shouldn’t the tech giants monetise hate speech?”. How far we’ve fallen.

Social media has been protected by the Safe Harbour rules because they had millions of users creating content which was difficult to monitor and moderate.

If they start producing their own content they might get considered like a news organisation with a whole different set of rules being applied to them and Safe Harbour being inapplicable.

With social media you can spend small amounts of money , create media and target people half across the globe from you.

ruzzian troll farm employee cannot call into fox news and say “create 100 John Does impersonating MAGA texans (or whatever), present them as real and I will pay you 5$ for that”. Such troll can automate all this and present media somewhat realistically on FB.

> How is this any different than traditional media?

Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.

Sure, and Ebola and influenza share traits too. I’m not sure that makes them interchangeable though.

>> How is this any different than traditional media?

Facebook is global. Traditional media is much more heavily regulated in some countries and while it may not be perfect, it's not comparable to the shit show that is social media.