Facebook Built Its vision of Democracy on Bad Math

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to once more defend himself and his platform. Responding to a cavalierly-tweeted charge of anti-Trump bias from the President of the United States, Zuckerberg again repeated his claim that Facebook was “a platform for all ideas,” and that, contrary to unfolding public opinion, his company did much more to further democracy than to stifle it. These arguments rest on a simple equation: The amount of information that a population shares is directly proportional to the quality of its democracy. And, as a corollary: the more viewpoints that get exposed, the greater the collective empathy and understanding.

This is what’s missing from Zuckerberg’s math—the transmutation of information into common myth. We have more data then ever before, but when you put it all together, it doesn’t add up to much.