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The financial incentives encourage this. All FB cares about is the monthly and daily active users don't dip, and they get more ad impressions. They don't care if the content is fake, so long as it gets eyeballs on the page or in the app.

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Similarly T-Mobile doesn't give a shit if I send my friends and family text messages full of lies

T-Mobile gets a flat fee regardless whether it's a lie or not.

Facebook gets more money the more eyeballs their algorithms decide to show the lie to.

There's also the part where the emotion that makes "engagement" the most likely is anger, so it makes sense to encourage, or at least not interfere, with the content that triggers that.

T-Mobile also doesn’t send your texts to millions of people based on the engagement they generate.

This is why analogies interfere with clear thinking and shouldn't be used as arguments. Usually it's like this. There's a superficial similarity between the two things being compared. Otherwise, those two things are very different, and the comparison is meaningless because of those differences. It's so banal and irksome to see this fallacy everywhere in discussions.

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It saddens me to no end that this constitutes "daily activity". I want to see a day where the non critical internet is unplugged, just to hear crowds rejoy in new found mental space and energy

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