So, did Facebook cause the gilets jaunes uprising in France? Maybe, interesting theory; meanwhile, though, I don’t even know why it’s recommending I friend someone I’ve never heard of. Did Facebook swing the 2016 election? Could have, as far as we know; anyway, I can’t even guess why Instagram started showing me a bunch of photos of a certain breed of dog or why it’s suddenly serving me ads for meal kits. I know how these things make me feel, but Facebook knows how they made me behave — knowledge it won’t soon share.

It appears to be the tendency of the press, and of our imaginations in general, to extend these theories in a particular direction. After years of Facebook’s telling us how good it is at connecting people and influencing their decisions, it is tempting to say something like: Yes, O.K., then wouldn’t it have been easy to use these same tools to persuade people to vote for Donald Trump? Facebook has equivocated on this question in a telling way. It’s helpful to imagine what it would have to say to successfully combat claims Russia used its platform to swing the election: Sure, this many users saw propaganda but only for a moment; and besides, this content didn’t seem to affect their behavior in any way at all; sure, this amount of money was spent on ads, but those ads don’t appear to have done anything; yes, these Instagram accounts had that many followers, but more than half of them were bots themselves; O.K., 76 million people were exposed to this content in some way or another, but they mostly glossed over it, like spam.

They’ve inched tellingly in this direction but going all the way would involve unflattering disclosure — the sort that would need to be legally compelled. Mainly, it would be tantamount to admitting that the systems we’re not allowed to know about — and the metrics we aren’t allowed to see — might not be quite as valuable, or as worthy of trade secrecy, as Facebook needs us to think they are. While it’s true that perceptions of the tech industry have shifted, they aren’t necessarily closer to reality. These companies mythologized their own omniscience when it was a boon to their business. Versions of these myths persist, but they’re no longer under their creator’s control — and they’re starting to bite back.