"FACEBOOK – you are on the wrong side of history.” Thus spake Carole Cadwalladr in her extraordinary Ted talk, in which she lacerated the bosses of social media and questioned whether we can ever have a fair election or referendum again.

At the core of Cadwalladr’s argument, which she has played out bravely as a freelance journalist often in the face of threatening abuse, is the belief that organisations such as Leave.EU and its notorious donor Aaron Banks, one of the self-proclaimed “Bad Boys of Brexit”, knowingly targeted far-right supporters with the connivance of Facebook’s shady advertising algorithms.

It is a story that has dominated the media this week, energised by Cadwalladr’s nomination for a Pulitzer Prize and Channel 4 News’s nightly coverage of the story. The fallout has not been great for the BBC’s former Westminster boss Robbie Gibb, who was implicated by Channel 4 in what looks close to a cover-up of the scandal.

Gibb is now Theresa May’s head of communications. After allegedly playing a role in suppressing the story within the BBC, Banks supposedly said “Robbie is being quite helpful and says he’s trying to hose it down”.

People will have different views about the rights and wrongs of seeking to reach far-right and anti-Muslim hate groups such as Britain First, the English Defence League (EDL) and the Football Lads Alliance in a democratic referendum, but it is the manner in which they were targeted that leaves the biggest unanswered questions.

Channel 4 claimed that Leave.EU falsified and staged videos that were virulently anti-immigrant in order to reach those groups. Then, with an advertising budget beyond the dreams of most democratic organisations, Leave.EU paid to draw on Facebook’s “like” buttons to profile those people who may be vulnerable or amenable to anti-immigrant sentiments.

Facebook has now banned the British National Party (BNP), the EDL and Britain First, despite having denied that they had played any part in empowering extremism. But the horse had long since bolted.

Reaching out to the far-right outliers in a democracy may arguably be a legitimate campaign tactic – feeding them false stories about immigration and fostering racial hatred within society is most certainly not.

Facebook is having a nightmare of a month. Not only are many people fleeing from the platform, their rates of user-attention are in steep decline too. But it was two other stories that caught my attention this week, and neither of them bode well for Facebook’s future.

The social media company’s track record in public health is already poor and has come under more fierce attack from two very different sources.

Recently, Dr Miriam Stoppard, the celebrity doctor – if such a concept is in any way useful – spoke out about Facebook’s’ pernicious role in spreading the so-called “Vaxx Myth”. This is a long-standing sore within public health and dates back to 1998, when the now disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield published a study in The Lancet suggesting that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine could trigger autism.

As someone who campaigns for greater awareness of autism, I clearly have a dog in this fight. Medical evidence and rational information are not helped by hype, scaremongering and ill-informed social media gossip, and that, unfortunately, is what Facebook permits with too much shoulder-shrugging.

We are now in the troubling situation where, according to the World Health Organisation, the anti-vaxx movement is listed as one of the top 10 global health threats facing humanity. The proportion of infants immunised against MMR has dropped four years in a row and outbreaks of diseases such as mumps and measles, which were once a scourge of the black-and-white past, are alarmingly on the rise again.

Scotland is currently in the midst of a mumps epidemic, and the number of reported cases of the viral disease has soared from 154 to 2884 in a year, with the concomitant risk of viral meningitis Curiously, teenagers are the worst affected, and there is much that can be made of that – they are the generation who were born when the anti-vaccination myth first emerged.

DESPITE numerous and substantial studies that show the MMR vaccine is safe, more than 50% of adults have seen either stories or videos on Facebook that peddle the myth that the vaccine causes autism.

It would be unthinkable in any other regulated branch of the media – television, radio and even newspapers – that such a damaging narrative would be allowed to circulate unchallenged.

In Australia, parents who refuse to immunise their children lose welfare benefits. It’s not a solution I agree with, but is nonetheless proof of the determination that some feel needs to be in place to protect public health.

In France, vaccination is mandatory, and parents who fail to vaccinate their children are fined. French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe recently said it was “unacceptable” that children are “still dying of measles” in the country where some of the earliest vaccines were pioneered. In Italy, health minister Beatrice Lorenzin pointed a finger at Facebook, and claimed that falling vaccination rates in the country were “an emergency generated by fake news’’.

There are counter-arguments, of course. The online journal The Conversation has bravely tried to bring light to a subject that is riddled with conflicting opinions and made the entirely reasonable point that the so-called anti-vaxxers are a minority that simply don’t have the influence or power attributed to them.

That may be the case, but social media is by its nature an aggregator and has given the anti-vaxxers amplification beyond their numbers. For example, the anti-vaxx YouTube host Del Bigtree, with his 40,000 subscribers, has targeted niche groups rather than the mass. His message has been skewed towards orthodox religious groups. There has already been documented outbreaks of measles within ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities and within American-Somlians in Minnesota, where the community was directly targeted by anti-vaxx campaigners.

Facebook, which has been inundated with complaints about its woeful track record in circulating ill-informed opinion on matters of public health, has at least put up a defence. The network recently said: “We are working to tackle vaccine misinformation by reducing its distribution and providing people with authoritative information on the topic.”

But with no regulatory framework in place and no way of gaining access to the way their recommendation algorithms work, we can only take their word for it.

Meanwhile, charities such as the Epilepsy Society share the gathering doubt. They are campaigning for more responsible attitudes to the risk posed by flashing images on social media. Eighteen-thousand people are at risk from photosensitive epileptic seizures, a problem that mainstream television has worked hard under regulatory pressure to get right. Not a news bulletin or a pop-video show goes on air now without prior warnings of flashing cameras or strobe lighting.

Facebook, by contrast, has dragged its feet, saying that monitoring posts prior to publication is too complex or too time consuming, but it’s a lame excuse. The time when we treated social media publishing as a special category that can evade or ignore regulation is long gone.

For Facebook, the charge-sheet is mounting. Cadwalladr has done us all a favour speaking truth to power. It is difficult to think of another media company in corporate history that has been accused of manipulating democracy and harming public health.

Facebook is on the wrong side of history and it is time it changed its ways.