If you’ve followed any of the news about Facebook over the past year or two, you’ve probably heard the company make claims about giving its community a voice and other things that sound very democratic.

However, as Matt Jordan explains, that is not the case at all. He joined the Democracy Works podcast to make the case that Facebook is a company whose primary goal is to make money, not serve democracy or the public good.  Jordan is an associate professor of media studies at Penn State and co-director of the Social Thought Program.

Listen to an interview with Jordan on the Democracy Works podcast, produced by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State and WPSU Penn State.

Jordan has also spent time studying the history of the term fake news and found that it goes back much farther than Donald Trump. He talks about how fake news in 2018 looks different than it did in 1918 and what responsibility journalists and news consumers have to push back against it.

We have access to more information now than at any other time in history, but we trust that information less than ever before. A Gallup survey recently found that 58 percent of respondents felt less informed because of today’s information abundance. As with a lot of things in life, too much of a good thing might not be so good after all.

New episodes of Democracy Works are released every week. Subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app.