For months, the headlines have been thumbs-down -- way down -- for Facebook.

Its historic stock market plunge followed an epic privacy breach, misinformation campaigns that skewed our last election, bad actors fomenting violence, and evidence that teens are fleeing the social networking behemoth.

But there could be an unexpected silver lining in this avalanche of bad news. It can be used to make a compelling case to younger audiences about trustworthy information sources, and make them more discerning than older generations about what’s real and fake on the internet.

News-consumption habits form early, and the post-millennials are still up for grabs as news consumers. Legitimate news organizations, responsible corporate citizens and concerned parents and educators have an opportunity to influence the long game in protecting our democracy by teaching this generation about reputable sources of information.

It’s better for everyone if teens aren’t exposed to malicious, fake content posing as news on Facebook. But even if Facebook doesn’t make changes to its content rules, teenagers are abandoning the site, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. Just 51 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 said they use Facebook -- down from the 71 percent in Pew’s previous study in 2015. They are likely leaving because their parents and grandparents are on it. They prefer YouTube, Instagram (also owned by Facebook) or Snapchat.

While media-savvy teens are certainly aware that bad information takes root and spreads socially, it’s just as important that they learn why. If your local newspaper published the views of those who deny the Holocaust or claim mass shootings like Sandy Hook were staged, those views would be put into proper context as untrue conspiracies. News companies have a vested interest in the truth. That credibility is what eventually gets monetized.

Social media companies, however, have a vested interest in growing users and engagement, which can be sold to advertisers. Truth, accuracy and quality have not entered this equation. This is why malicious liars, bigots and harassers can find a megaphone and an audience of millions on social media sites.

Facebook’s inability, or unwillingness, to prevent its massive platform from being used for nefarious purposes has been on display for some time. But Zuckerberg is hardly alone in this calculation. Twitter hasn’t been serious about tackling its Nazi problem; YouTube has been a safe haven for fake and malicious content.

These tech giants are not invested in our country’s democratic values -- they care about their bottom line. This differentiation must be explained as part of every middle school and high school English lesson on sources of information.

And legitimate news organizations, who have relied on Facebook for traffic, should build younger audiences on Instagram and YouTube with more savvy. Take, for instance, the top news publishers on Instagram. The New York Times has 4 million subscribers and its feed heavily features compelling photography that plays well on the visual site. The Fox News feed, with half as many subscribers as the Times, features quotes that promote and praise the current administration’s policies.

Teenagers should be shown the differences in motive and approach to news.

Local media, in particular, can benefit from greater exposure through distribution apps like Apple News, the built-in news app on iOS, which aggregates and curates stories from a variety of third-party sources. Parents can make sure the news alerts on their teens’ phones are turned on -- even if they are just glancing at the headlines of the day.

In addition, corporations can be pressured not to run ads with brokers of misinformation, bigotry and harassment, who say vile, repulsive things about murdered children and their grieving parents. We can demand better, as consumers and citizens.

As long as social media sites remain “neutral” on truth and lies, we should cheer when our children dump them.

When I shared a story recently about a particularly vulgar piece of anonymous mail sent to me, I wanted to offer an observation about the change I’ve seen in public discourse.

Journalists have always had to field some angry responses. In my experience, that hate mail has become openly bigoted lately.

I was surprised by how many readers responded to that column. Nearly a hundred people wrote or called to say this anonymous letter upset them, and to offer a counter-perspective. Some even pulled out their own embossed stationery and note cards, while one reader sent a two-page handwritten letter. Many said they felt “compelled” to respond and shared their own backgrounds and reasons why. A 76-year-old gentleman said he was educated in Catholic schools and the only religions he had known of back then were “Protestant, Catholic and Jewish.”

“Your last weekend’s column haunted me ... Please don’t let it hurt your feelings or change you in any way,” he wrote. Rest assured, I wasn’t hurt nor intending to change.

Another older reader said she appreciated learning about Muslim traditions and my family’s cultural background from reading the column for years.

“I often think that, despite our age difference, we would be friends if we met,” she wrote. I’m inclined to agree whenever readers suggest we would be friends in real life. I’m a huge fan of newspaper readers as it is. And subscribers, I love. Even those who have never agreed with a single word I’ve written.

The writers of many of the notes said they were worried about the emboldened bigots and demise of civility, especially since the last election. One woman shared her coping strategy: “I think the best way ... is to get politically involved, volunteer in the community and do random acts of kindness. I will not sink to their level,” she wrote.

Her words inspired me to try to be kinder.

To be fair, there were a minority of dissenters: Those who said they see far worse vitriol from the left, and those who said journalists were bringing personal attacks upon themselves for their “biased” coverage.

I’ll leave it for readers to judge where they see most of the personal attacks and bigotry coming from. But, it is startling to see the two different realities that exist in our country right now. We used to be able to agree on a very basic set of facts and values, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. It seems that many of us can look out of the window and see rain, while others will insist it’s sunny.

A surprising number of those who wrote described themselves as white and then apologized for the bigoted mail others had sent. I appreciate their sentiment, but I hope they know that I would never hold an entire group responsible for the behavior of the fringe elements. As a Muslim, I’ve seen how collective blame works. Even those who abhor the hateful actions of a few are made to feel guilty. That’s always unfair.

A few readers shared that their families received anonymous angry letters in their mail after a letter to the editor they had written was published. It was disconcerting that a stranger had gone to the trouble of looking up the address of private citizens, writing and mailing an insulting letter simply because he or she disagreed with their opinions.

Unfortunately, there will always be those who try to stifle other people’s voices.

As an antidote, there were notes like this one: “I read your articles every week, and I agree with some and disagree with others, but I will always defend your right to express your opinion ... I’m a 71-year-old Army veteran who will always defend anyone’s right to express their opinion in a civil manner.”

Several readers who sent encouraging notes asked me to show their emails to my daughter, who had seen the original letter I wrote about. I printed out those emails and made sure she read them. Your responses taught her an even more important lesson -- that there are far more good and decent people in the world than those who seek to divide us.

I didn’t expect the avalanche of reactions you sent.

Thank you for flooding my inbox with hope.

There were two words that popped out at me from the initial statement issued by a suburban St. Louis police department after its officers falsely accused 10 black Washington University students of leaving an IHOP without paying.

“Certainly, I’m sorry they were inconvenienced and anxious about what happened,” Clayton Police Chief Kevin R. Murphy said a week ago. (The department has since offered an apology for how the situation was handled.)

“Inconvenienced” and “anxious” turned my stomach.

It’s not an “inconvenience” when you are detained and questioned by a state authority, despite being innocent of any wrongdoing. It doesn’t just make you “anxious” when you are considered suspect largely because of your race, ethnicity or religion.

For those who have never experienced that sort of situation, I’ll share what it felt like when I traveled to Israel in 2012. My husband and I went as tourists with a group of journalists, my colleagues during my Knight Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. My husband, who was a British citizen and American permanent resident back then, is always detained for extra security clearance every single time we travel internationally.

This time, as we entered Israel at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, I was the subject of intense scrutiny. We were both taken out of the entry line and led to a waiting room. There was one other young man in the room with his elderly mom. They were Orthodox Christians who had come to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for Palm Sunday. I asked him how long he had been waiting to get cleared for entry. When he said 10 hours, my heart sank.

After 45 minutes of sitting and waiting, I got more nervous.

The Israelis had my passport. How long would I be held in this room? Would I be able to communicate with the rest of the group waiting for us? What was going to happen next?

In that moment, you feel powerless. You’ve lost your freedom of movement. You are at the mercy of those already suspicious of your very identity.

You don’t feel inconvenienced. You feel like a hostage.

I was taken back to a smaller interrogation room. Four different Israeli authorities asked me why I was coming to the country. They also wanted to know: my father’s name, my grandfather’s name, where I was born, where my parents were born, where my parents lived in America, who I would be seeing in Israel, where I would be going and staying, who I was traveling with, which countries my travel companions were from, my occupation, what I write about, how I knew the person who arranged the trip, my personal email address, my cell number and my home number in the United States.

I was worried about accidentally misspeaking during this interrogation. I tried to remember my grandfathers’ given names, versus the titles and names I knew them by. I wondered if the security officials were going to ask for the passwords to my email accounts, and how I would respond. I have a public online profile and body of work, so a quick Google search would have revealed exactly who I am.

Most of all, I wondered if this ordeal had been worth trying to see a part of the world I had always wanted to visit. About an hour into this, an influential Israeli journalist who was helping coordinate things for our group made a call on our behalf to the airport authority. We were released shortly thereafter.

Now imagine you are a teenager -- away from home, under suspicion for a crime you didn’t commit, unsure of what might happen to you, and more than likely having seen plenty of videos of police officers fatally shooting unarmed black men.

You don’t feel “anxious” in that situation. You are scared, angry, humiliated, panicked and upset.

Like those Wash U student, I benefited from the backing of a powerful institution.

If these students hadn’t been affiliated with Wash U, would any of us even have heard about it? Would the Clayton Police Department have apologized days later? If an Israeli journalist had not intervened on my behalf, how many hours would I have sat in that interrogation room with armed security questioning me?

The aftermath of the Clayton incident provoked revealing commentary on all sides of the issue.

I read thoughts of those who do not worry about being pulled over every time they drive, who do not think about being detained and questioned every time they fly, who do not expect neighbors to call the police on their children if they set up a lemonade stand in front of their homes. I suppose if you haven’t frequently found yourself suspect for no reason but your race or ethnicity, you might be able to have a casual attitude about being detained by police.

If the police got a report that young black diners left a restaurant without paying, well then, what were the cops supposed to do but stop a group of black kids they see in the vicinity? Regardless of whether some of the kids had receipts, regardless of how few matched a limited description, what’s the big deal of “inconveniencing” 10 students when a $60 unpaid bill is at stake?

Perhaps consider an alternate scenario where it might be your own children under a cloud of suspicion for similar reasons. Nearly all mass school shooters are male. Should any threat or hoax prompt the police to detain, search and question male students based on the most common demographic traits of school shooters? What if your teenage son was pulled out of his class because he looked like Nikolas Cruz, Adam Lanza, Elliot Rodger, Eric Harris or Dylan Klebold, all of whom have committed some of the worst mass school shootings in America?

What if it was your teenage child who was publicly embarrassed, suspected of a crime, questioned and detained by police because he matched a description?

I mean, what are the police supposed to do?