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From Facebook to X to TikTok, today’s social media giants position themselves as bastions of free speech. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg now says fact-checking caused “too much censorship,” while TikTok brandishes a freedom-of-expression argument against its forced sale. Who, after all, could argue against the untrammeled freedom to speak?

The answer, it transpires, might be anyone paying attention. As we begin to understand the cataclysmic effect of viral misinformation flooding social media, the undeniable reality is that these media empires profiteer hugely from division and fear. In everything from politics to health, falsehoods propagated across social media cause immense harm. From 2018’s genocide against Myanmar’s Rohingya people, incited on Facebook, to X, Facebook and Telegram posts last year that sparked violent anti-immigrant riots in the U.K. to the people who gave 1.8 million views to a TikTok video that encouraged them to take bleach enemas to cure supposed parasite infestation, the evidence is clear that social media myths cause huge societal harm.

While Europe has moved to hold social media giants accountable, U.S. efforts have almost completely faltered, with YouTube, X and other platforms curtailing misinformation teams and allowing conspiracy theories to run riot. The industry’s now familiar attempts to deny responsibility for the harms of immensely lucrative products follows a familiar, deeply instructive playbook: the tobacco industry’s strategy of obstruction.

Just as four in 10 people were once smokers in the U.S., poisoning their lungs, vast numbers of people now get their news through the editorial prism of social media, poisoning their perceptions.

Around a fifth of Americans now get their news from social media influencers. A recent European survey of older teenagers and young adults found that 42 percent got their news mainly from social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram. In the past two decades, social media giants have displaced traditional media as the news source for many, without the pesky issues of journalistic integrity or editorial responsibility. Instead they profit off engagement. And it is here that the corporate avarice and mendacity of the tobacco industry are especially illuminating.

Long before the overwhelming harms of smoking were widely known, tobacco companies already knew their product was harmful and addictive. Instead of taking corrective action, they spent decades undermining any regulation, even while cigarettes continued to kill millions. Opting not to mitigate harms but to instead distract from the overwhelming evidence their product was deadly, they aggressively pushed their product on vulnerable audiences. One now infamous leaked memo from a tobacco company in the 1960s bragged that “doubt is our product,” a means to distract from the harms of their profitable industry.

In the information age, social media companies are no different. From their own internal metrics, tech giants have long known what independent research now continuously validates: that the content that is most likely to go viral is that which induces strong feelings such as outrage and disgust, regardless of its underlying veracity. Moreover, they also know that such content is heavily engaged with and most profitable. Far from acting against false, harmful content, they placed profits above its staggering—and damaging—social impact to implicitly encourage it while downplaying the massive costs.

We’ve known this at least since the aftermath of the divisive 2016 American presidential election, where the culpability of social media for its signature triumph of fictions was greeted with what now looks like mock contrition. Tech giants such as Facebook even trumpeted their partnerships with fact-checking organizations.

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