Facebook begs to be regulated – but wants to pick how | Emily Bell

Three years on from the US election, tech firms are seeking rules that won't hit their profits

A year on from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, two and a half years on from the advent of fake news and the 2016 presidential elections, and many years on from academics and occasional journalists raising their hands in concern about the emerging issues of our information environment, are we any closer to fixing the problem?

Like climate change and the financial system, the answer to this question is both yes, and no. Yes in that we now, at least, have a shared understanding of just how great the problems are: we have a totally unregulated media environment run by a handful of giant US corporations that built their companies so fast it is now clear they had no idea what they were doing. Or, indeed, how to effectively stop some of the unwanted consequences such as genocide, live-streamed terror attacks and stolen elections. And no, in that our capacity to agree on what "fixing" might look like is extremely limited.