Social media was definitely the start of that downfall. Yeah people used to spread misinformation longer before social media was a thing. But what Facebook changed was the way how misinformation could be targeted with surgical precision.
If your "just increasing shareholder value" is found to cause damages to the public, you should be held to account for that.
But if we take a more relevant comparison: In the financial sector, banks are responsible for detecting abuse.
They’re not the only ones responsible, but they don’t get to absolve all responsibility because someone else committed a crime using the banks infrastructure.
> As a 1984 R.J. Reynolds report stated:1819
> “Younger adult smokers are the only source of replacement smokers… If younger adults turn away from smoking, the industry must decline.”
And the reason those laws existed was precisely because companies couldn’t be trusted to regulate themselves.