Behind the Political Curtain at Facebook: Bloomberg’s Vernon Silver and Ben Elgin take readers on a tour of the mess that is Facebook, who tries to have it both ways.  On the one hand, FB has tried to portray itself as a unknowing victim of any alleged Russian election-meddling (“hey, we only cashed the checks”) but Silver exposes Facebook’s coziness with various governments:

“In some of the world’s biggest democracies—from India and Brazil to Germany and the U.K.—the [Facebook] unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers. And once a candidate is elected, the company in some instances goes on to train government employees or provide technical assistance for live streams at official state events.”

And some of those governments have a bad record of using social media to less than enlightening ends. Facebook’s relationship with India is a good example. As Indian Prime Minister Modi’s social media reach grew, his followers increasingly turned to Facebook and WhatsApp to target harassment campaigns against his political rivals. India has become a hotbed for fake news, with one hoax story this year that circulated on WhatsApp leading to two separate mob beatings resulting in seven deaths. The nation has also become an increasingly dangerous place for opposition parties and reporters. In the past year, several journalists critical of the ruling party have been killed. Hindu extremists who back Modi’s party have used social media to issue death threats against Muslims or critics of the government.

Silver and Elgin have a terrific track record of exposing the use by Arab regimes of telecom apps to suppress — and even make disappear — political dissents, and broke the story on FinFisher, a malware used  to hunt down political opponents.