You're on fire, Umair. A very powerful article and entirely correct. However I take hope (and fear) from the fact that the all-conquering tide of bullshit from Facebook ISN'T unprecedented.
It's precedented. Boy, is it precedented.
Let's look at the invention of printing: within ten years printing had been weaponised by the Catholic church into the massive sale of indulgences all over Europe. An indulgence was basically a passport which let you into Heaven sooner, depending on how much you paid for it. Their popularity paid for the building of St Peter's in Rome, by the way. Then Martin Luther used printing to flood Europe with pamphlets against Catholicism, which led to the Protestant Reformation and thirty years of civil war in Germany, the epicentre of the new technology.
Printing reverberated for hundreds of years.
The next new communications technology was the railways - which may not have caused the American Civil War but certainly made it much more deadly.
After that came telegrams, telephones, radio. World War I anyone? No, not a cause but a facilitator.
And after that, film. A brand new unprecedented technology that communicated emotion. Once more entire populations were defenceless against it, swept up by it, addled by it.
Leni Reifenstahl comes to mind. And an unimpressive extremist populist called Hitler used film and radio to take over one of the most civilized countries in Europe. With exactly the same modus operandi of using a new technology to overwhelm most people's ability to think.
Then television gave a good return to politicians because people hadn't grown defences to it - if it was on the telly, it must be true, right?
And now social media.
New methods of communication - especially when they can overcome with emotion - are extremely dangerous and can overwhelm entire populations. This has happened before and will happen again, in waves. And that's why I have hope.
People have learnt not to trust radio, film, tv, just as they learnt not to trust something just because it was in print. They'll learn not to trust social media too.
Let's hope they do it in time.
Otherwise history tells us that we're looking at civil war in America.
