The article makes a reasonable argument that the US would benefit if Facebook were to unilaterally refuse to run political ads, but unless I missed it, it made no mention of why Facebook as a profit driven company would benefit from refusing to accept money from political campaigns. This would seem to be a glaring omission, because unless Facebook stands to benefit, it seems unlikely that Facebook would voluntarily make such a change.

So: how can we better align the incentives of the social media companies with the goals of the public as a whole?