After the election, many people blamed Facebook for spreading partisan — and largely pro-Trump — “fake news,” like Pope Francis’s endorsement of Trump, or Hillary Clinton’s secret life-threatening illness. The company was assailed for prioritizing user “engagement,” meaning that its algorithms probably favored juicy fake news over other kinds of stories. Those algorithms had taken ...

This month, the New York state attorney general issued a report on a scheme by “U.S. Companies and Partisans [to] Hack Democracy.” This wasn’t another attempt by Republicans to make it harder for Black people and urban residents to vote. It was a concerted attack on another core element of U.S. democracy — the ability ...