If you listen to content creators, successful ones, there is a strange gap occurring in what social media algorithms push, versus what is known to work. The result is a marked decrease in density of what was previously successful content, because suddenly there is doubt as to what content actually is in a given platform. Since quality content always makes a platform stand out, a sharp drop in "commitment" shown by high-profile creators to consistency is an indicator that the platform has become unnavigible and its future is too much of a gamble. When multiple platforms interact, it creates opportunities for one platform to displace aspects of the other. Note that Facebook Live video was a financial disappointment, because it had extremely narrow content, and almost no "successful" original content of its own. (They also amplified "controversies" that were targetted at disparaging competitor content which many bought into and was quite successful. In that they cultivated a political dialectic and attitude and leveraged it against YouTube, a competitor with superior quality content, and made a small dent in the reputations of top content creators.

So why is Facebook so sure their decaying reputation is "nothing"?

Because their business plan (of rapidly diversifying as fast as possible) allows for their core product to fail slowly without actually hitting their bottom line.

Facebook doesnt care if their algorithms make their platform into a toilet from here on out, because they've already extracted the peak value from the social media boom. So it really doesnt matter to them at this point if they become distrusted as a news source, because Facebook news isnt the future, it's the present.

Either that or they are so compartmentalized that executives within the company dont actually know whats going on outside of their immediate vicinity. And they do have incentive to maintain the impression that their ad platform is the "the most cutting edge".

I have a little bit of experience using their analytics inadvertantly over a year ago when I ran an parody political campaign for messianic Zoids villain, Krark. Who btw is not Skynet.

In the process, it appeared that Facebook generates randomized "impressions" right at the start of an ad run designed to encourage certain usage of their features. But if you look closely, you find that while the accounts involved are indeed real, the reported "action" upon which the reported impression is based is untraceble (fabricated). If this scales up on larger advertisers, thats a huge amount of "decoy data" they're generating before presumably delivering actual hard click-through data that the advertiser could verify later on.

Basically, instead of saying "we dont have enough data to tell you anything meaningful yet", they give you realistic-looking "noise" until a threshold is reached. Perhaps that noise has some kind of stats/marketting use that I dont know about, but it seems weird. At first, it seemed legitimate, but the reporting of engagement as one thing, when it was a different thing, seems unusually fuzzy.

In other words: the algorithm itself is disingenuous. Ironically, it may very well have distorted the whole "Russian Ads" thing to something different than it really was, and the reason FB isnt forthcoming about that data is because it calls attention to something about their system that would turn away new advertisers (those not yet experienced in how to deal with its quirks and game the system by its rules). Existing advertisers would probably stay, but this would put a damper on growth and cause marketers to put more effort into another platform that's more transparent, like YouTube, or Twitter.

TLDR: I think Facebook has had problems for a long time, and nobody bothered to examine them until the recent situation.