Last week — as Alex Jones was being booted by most major platforms — Campbell Brown. Facebook’s head of news partnerships,  said in a meeting with media executives that Facebook doesn’t care about publishers anymore. Meaning, it would no longer be working with companies to boost traffic to their sites. 

This comes as a relief to many. New York ran a piece “SEO is Back. Thanks God.” on its vertical select/all. 

Facebook refuted the claim this week. It said Brown had been misquoted by those present and its “goal at Facebook — what the team works on every day with publishers and reporters around the world — is to help journalism succeed and thrive, both on our platform and off.”

Still, Facebook’s mishandling of news over the past couple of years has led to damage that can’t be undone. 

Unverified and fake news stories littered the site leading up to the 2016 election and continue — despite some half-baked efforts from the company to fact check or create labels marking advertising and news as political, and therefore, partisan. Conspiracy theories flourish on the social network.

Plus, many users share links without actually checking the source of what they’re sending out.

So, you might think that most Americans would be in favor of stricter policies surrounding platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google and the information that appears on them.

The results of a new survey, “Major Internet Companies as News Editors,” created by the Knight Foundation and Gallup, polled over 2,000 adults across the U.S. The survey gauged how users feel about the work being done by the platforms regarding news delivery and how it might be improved. 

The results reveal a public at odds with what it wants from social media.

According to the results, 54% of those surveyed believe companies like Facebook help people become better informed about the world, however, 85% don’t think such platforms do enough to stop the spread of misinformation. 

An incredible 80% of those polled believe the platforms should show all users “the same information from the same news organizations,” filtering nothing. Some 80% of those polled also believe internet companies should be “regulated like traditional media,” but place this onus on the companies themselves and their users.

Those polled don’t seem to understand how or if media is actually regulated.  

The respondents also want to see more transparency about how news is delivered from the platforms, with 88% agreeing they should publicly share their methods.  

Sixty-three percent of those polled are concerned about the role internet companies could play as “news editors,” which seems the most logical of all the numbers. With the duopoly already spreading information to millions, giving them the power to control what the public sees or doesn’t is suspect at best.