For much of the past two years, Facebook has struggled to contain the spread of misinformation on its platform. But instead of taking responsibility, one of the company’s most prominent leaders chose to blame users this week instead. In an interview with Axios, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said that individual people are to blame for spreading false and dangerous information, and that it isn’t Facebook’s job to police their speech.

“Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing,” Bosworth said.

“Our ability to know what is misinformation is itself in question and I think reasonably so, so I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that we possess enough fundamental rightness even in our most scientific centers of study to exercise that kind of power on a citizen, another human, and on what they want to say and who they want to listen to,” he continued.

Bosworth has a point that Facebook shouldn’t be responsible for shaping what kind of speech is and isn’t allowed online. But what he doesn’t seem to understand is that Facebook already has that power, whether it wants to or not, and it also has the technology to do more about the problem. That is the company’s reality, and the sooner it accepts it, the better off its users will be.

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