I Helped Make Facebook's Ad Machine. Here's How to Fix It

THIS MONTH, TWO magnificently embarrassing public-relations disasters rocked the Facebook money machine like nothing else in its history.

First, Facebook revealed that shady Russian operators purchased political ads via Facebook in the 2016 election. That's right, Moscow decided to play a role in American democracy and targeted what are presumed to have been fake news, memes, and/or various bits of slander (Facebook refuses to disclose the ad creative, though it has shared it with special counsel Robert Mueller) at American voters in an attempt to influence the electoral course of our 241-year-old republic. And all that on what used to be a Harvard hook-up app.