Facebook's new ad wants you to forget about that whole subverting democracy thing

This time, it will be different. This time, and I know you've heard this before, but this time Facebook's really going to change.

Yes, I know the company allowed third-party apps to scrape your data, and yes it allowed Russian trolls to foment race-based violence on its platform, but that's not who Facebook really is. Don't believe me? Well then take a look at this genuine and authentic and not-at-all-focus-grouped 60-second ad spot that the company released today.

"We came here for the friends," begins the advertisement. "But then something happened, we had to deal with spam, clickbait, fake news, and data misuse. That's going to change."

See? It's going to change, and everything is going to get better. The company explicitly told us as much. And Mark Zuckerberg always tells it like it is.

"Because when this place does what it was built for," closes out the ad, "then we all get a little closer."

Now, I know what you're thinking: Wasn't Facebook built to rank the relative hotness of Harvard coeds? No, sorry, that was Facemash — Zuckerberg's other website that he built out of a Harvard dorm room.

Facebook as we know it today was built to gather as much data as possible about its users and to leverage that data to solidify its place as an advertising juggernaut. Oh, and to be here for the friends — possibly in the form of a chair? To be honest, we're still trying to figure out Facebook's last ad.

But if there's one thing Facebook's new ad makes clear, it's that its service was definitely not built to facilitate the subversion of our democracy. Nope. It's just here to make friends.