In the year 2018, at the height of the Russia Scare, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was hauled in front of a tribunal of tech-illiterate politicians and asked to explain himself.

"It was my mistake, and I'm sorry," Zuckerberg told senators who are upset about the company's exploitation (and fumbling) of user data—which, unbeknownst to them, was social media's entire business model.

A number of panics have brought us to this preposterous place: the idea that Russian trolls on Facebook could swing the 2016 election and undermine our "democracy"; the idea that Facebook's leftward bias is so corrosive that we should regulate it like a utility; and, finally, the general way in which social media tends to reveal the ugly side of human nature—which is indeed scary but has little to do with any particular platform.