Facebook can't protect voters from their own gullibility

The only way to fight election meddling is with skepticism

Fake news.
(Image credit: Illustrated | AP Photo/Jon Elswick, The7Dew/iStock)

"The whole thing is just a big distraction for the country," President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, said Tuesday of investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. "You look at what Russia did — buying some Facebook ads to try and sow dissent. And it's a terrible thing, but I think the investigation and all the speculation that's happened over the past two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy."

As Kushner no doubt knows, “buying some Facebook ads” is not all the Russian government did. The social media operations alone were far more complex and varied, to say nothing of the hacking of Democratic officials' email accounts. Kushner's convenient oversimplification deserves the pushback it's received.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.