I dont think Facebook is merely a scapegoat. In the sense that the very existence of Facebook is threatening to the establishment. More than any other company in US, Facebook has (or used to have considering the declining active users) a direct connection to every citizen in the country through their timeline. If Zuckerberg was so inclined he could have had a very strong effect on the outcome of elections. No other corporation comes close. The closest in this regard are the big media houses (CNN, Fox etc.) who do wield influence but are regulated and have to compete with each other. Neither of these limitations exist for FB as of now. Think how the government would have acted if all the media houses merged into a single company under a slightly misanthropic CEO who hints at political aspirations.
Secondly, FB might amplify our flaws but this is a structural issue contingent on the very design of the newsfeed algorithm. Instead of blaming ourselves and embarking on a nationwide self improvement campaign we can think about minor design changes that could perhaps alleviate these effects.
I was with your post up until the final sentence, which struck me as a worrying enough point that I had to comment. (re: minor design changes rather than self improvement.)
The fact that the mentality has changed from "let's improve ourselves" to "let's legislate and limit" is part of what makes this debate so scary; this is not a new opinion for me however, I certainly tend to fall on the side of self-empowerment and positive (as opposed to negative) liberty in most cases and see facebook as a lesser of MANY evils of which the population/media has neglected. (Credit card data exchanges, NSA bulk collection, at&t room 641a, equifax, etc. This is far from the first time I've made a similar ramble to this)
Especially given that I tend to agree with the OP that it's a manifestation of our "lizard brain" that's actually the vulnerability here, and that govt. doesn't have a great history of managing these sort of things (Prohibition, sex work laws, drug war) I'm very remiss to give them more a hand in controlling the people.
ESPECIALLY given that, frankly, the way this is being legislated will leave facebook with exclusive control over their graph, as opposed to democratizing and making people aware of it. Even GDPR, for instance, will allow FB to compute aggregate and trend statistics on the graph data, which will be sufficiently deanonymized while preserving the bulk of the "insight" data they and only they gleaned.
I said a lot of things here and probably undermined my own point with some of them, but broadly, I think there's both evidence that it is a scapegoating, and that there are major pitfalls in how we're trying to address it.
Secondly, FB might amplify our flaws but this is a structural issue contingent on the very design of the newsfeed algorithm. Instead of blaming ourselves and embarking on a nationwide self improvement campaign we can think about minor design changes that could perhaps alleviate these effects.