But that should make us step back and enlarge the question: If this is what electoral campaigns look like online, and especially on the largest social platform, Facebook, then what can be done about that?

Put simply: Is Facebook too big to work?

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When I say Facebook, I don’t mean exclusively the corporate entity, Facebook Inc. While Facebook has built the system, it now contains vastly more actors contributing to its functioning than Facebook employs or directly controls.

No one has ever seen a system like this because none has ever existed. It’s software and interfaces and tools. It’s a social network. It’s an advertising vehicle. It’s the key media distributor. But, like a city or a nation, it’s also human behaviors, habits, norms. Because much of it is built on machine learning, which transforms user behavior into new software adjustments, users and algorithms drive each other by design.

If everyone stops clicking on something, soon the software will stop showing it to anyone. If Facebook pushes video into feeds, people will watch more video. These feedback loops are what Facebook is as an attention-gathering machine. They ensure that the system is always calibrated for you and you and you. In the lethal struggle between Silicon Valley’s most valuable companies, which are also America’s most valuable companies, this ability to hold human attention as well as any invention since television is Facebook’s competitive advantage.

Because users are so important in this system, Andreessen Horowitz’s Ben Evans argues that Facebook has only very limited control of the system. Facebook is, in his terms, “extremely good at surfing user behavior.” He notes that Facebook’s News Feed algorithm doesn’t make “editorial” but merely mechanistic rankings, based on a variety of factors including but not limited to how many people click, like, and share a story.

“This applies at every level of scale—whether it's creating an entirely new product or tuning some small feature based on a daily or hourly feedback loop—Facebook doesn't determine what the feedback tells it,” Evans writes. He compares Facebook to a fashion designer. They don’t create the zeitgeist, but merely try to capture it. Every failed Facebook product—and there are some—is evidence for this proposition.

This is an important point in understanding the beast. Facebook’s control over its platform has significant limitations.

But Evans’s model of the interaction between Facebook Inc. and Facebook is scoped too narrowly. It’s a good way of thinking about Facebook the business, but not a good way of thinking about Facebook the phenomenon as we experience it. Which makes sense: Evans is a business analyst.

However, the product-sales model of Facebook Inc. doesn't capture everything about Facebook's broader system.

First, the network effects of Facebook are sweeping and intense. They’ve got users pretty well locked in because their friends and their data are both inside. Nobody really believes that Microsoft Word or Adobe PDFs are the platonic ideal of word processing and document sharing, but they work well enough, and everybody else is using them. Facebook has become this type of utility for most social networking.