Just as tobacco companies knew they were poisoning people, today’s social media titans knowingly poison our politics, peddling lies and stoking angry divides for profit

From Facebook to X to TikTok, today’s social media giants position themselves as bastions of free speech. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now says fact-checking caused “too much censorship,” while TikTok brandishes a freedom-of-expression argument against its forced sale. Who, after all, could argue against the untrammeled freedom to speak?

The answer, it transpires, might be anyone paying attention. As we begin to understand the cataclysmic effect of viral misinformation flooding social media, the undeniable reality is that these media empires profiteer hugely from division and fear. In everything from politics to health, falsehoods propagated across social media cause immense harm.