The other week, Facebook chose a curious moment to give me a survey. I had just deleted the app from my phone, likely because of some fresh horror about ad targeting, and when I next pulled up the site in my browser, I got this message: “Please agree or disagree with the following statement: Facebook is good for the world.” I rolled my eyes, “strongly disagreed,” and logged out of my browser. But eight hours later, I was back to scrolling through my News Feed. This pattern isn’t new: I’ve spent much of the last year insisting to anyone who’ll listen that Facebook, Twitter, and the like will be responsible for the demise of democracy—while being drawn back to the feeds, again and again.

Miranda Katz is an associate editor at Backchannel. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

There’s an instinct to point fingers; to find someone to blame for the information hellscape in which we now find ourselves. Every day one tech giant or another is forced to play defense, whether it’s Facebook being called out yet again for letting advertisers exclude audiences by race or Twitter bending to the whims of white nationalists who want to target reporters. Because we can’t quit the products, we become desperate for the companies to save us from ourselves.

That’s not going to happen, argues Data & Society founder and Microsoft researcher danah boyd. Google, Facebook, Twitter—none of these companies is sitting on a silver-bullet solution. As boyd wrote for us earlier this year, we have more than a technology problem: “[W]e have a cultural problem, one that is shaped by disconnects in values, relationships, and social fabric. Our media, our tools, and our politics are being leveraged to help breed polarization by countless actors who can leverage these systems for personal, economic, and ideological gain.” I spoke with boyd about the shifting public discourse around online disinformation campaigns, and what role the tech industry should play in rebuilding American society.

Miranda Katz: Back in March, the debate over fake news and what tech companies like Google and Facebook should be doing about it felt like it was reaching a fever pitch. You wrote a piece for us arguing that we can’t just look to the tech companies to fix fake news: We have to understand it as a cultural problem, too. That debate hasn't let up. Do you think it's still overly focused on finding a technological solution?

danah boyd: I think that it's still absolutely focused on the idea that technology will solve our way out of this. I think that we're still not taking a true public accounting of all of the different cultural factors that are at play. What's really striking about what's at stake is that we have an understanding of our American society and of there being a rational, bureaucratic process around democracy. But now there are such notable societal divisions, and rather than trying to bridge them, trying to remedy them, trying to figure out why people's emotions are speaking past one another, it's about looking for a blame, looking for somebody that we can hold responsible without holding ourselves individually and collectively responsible. Unfortunately, that's going to do squat. And, for the most part, we’re looking for something new to blame, which is why so much of the attention is focused on technology companies instead of politics, news media, or our economic incentives. We need to hold ourselves individually and collectively responsible, but that’s not where people are at.

We're not seeing something that is brand new. We're just distraught because hatred, prejudice, and polarization are now extraordinarily visible, and that the people who have power in this moment are not the actors that some of us believe should have power. And, of course, technology mirrors and magnifies the good, bad, and ugly of everyday life. There’s a peculiar contradiction and challenge of what we’ve built [with these platforms]. So many early internet creators hoped to build a decentralized system that would allow anybody to have power. We didn't account for the fact that the class of people who might leverage this strategically may do so for nefarious, adversarial, or destructive purposes.