This is true and I agree with that statement!
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Exactly. And to be clear, we’re not talking about Facebook filtering out “stories they don’t like because of politics” or a mysterious cabal fact-checking individual news items for their truthful content.
Let’s say FB users flag fake-news content and Facebook sees that flagged SuperAwesomeNews.com stories are being re-blogged over and over again. They take a look at SuperAwesomeNews and see that 85% of all of the news items on their site are completely invented fake news crap. They alert SuperAwesomeNews: “Hey, guys, your news is fake. Fix your shit in 30 days or every news item originating from your site will be perma-blocked on Facebook.” That’s a very big loss of eyeballs for SuperAwesomeNews, so it should put them on alert to stop putting out so many made-up stories about Hillary eating aardvark noses for lunch or whatever. Or maybe they decide that Facebook is a blip on their traffic, so they say fine, block us, and also, Hillary’s hair is made of snakes.
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But why would you block a Bigfoot story? At least they are entertaining
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Weekly World News isn’t getting their feed cut.
Nor is The Onion.
This is in-our-reality/dimension presumptive media.
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It’s my understanding that she likes them on LIE bread.
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This is pretty much what got me so worked up about this. I know exactly what you mean. I wish I knew what would be a solution, except of course sticking to principles.
Asking for anything slightly fascist scares me for several reasons.
The other side would welcome any such thing as they know full well how to exploit it once it gets into their hands. Also I am afraid of turning into what am fighting against. People on receiving end of such a solution would have every right to loath us for this.
I don’t live in US but know exactly what you guys are going through. I have seen populists come to power several times I several places. My native country had seen multiple waves of populists sweeping into power, neighboring countries also. Its never a pretty sight.
Fact is we live in a world where only a handful of companies effectively have monopoly (oligopoly?) over our communications. There is really very little practical choice or viable alternatives.
This has nothing to do with state demand.
Why refer to “fascism”?
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Just a referring to what was mentioned in previous comment. Authoritarian would be better term.
You’re relying on an authority channel for your communications to begin with. Why not email and RSS?
I’ve been reduced to this with a smaller core group of friends. I suppose I haven’t shut down my Instagram so I can still exchange my cat pics for others’ baby pics.
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Constructively (because I am certainly in the same boat as you) so who are you pleading to to save you from the social media monopolistic behavior? The same monopoly?
What alternatives have you considered?
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Personally I handcraft my own news every day from the observations that I make in the world around me.
It’s all hyperlocal, but at least I know I can trust my source.
I heard about some voting thing that was happening last week, but since I didn’t have time to verify that polls were actually open, just ignored the whole thing. So it didn’t happen!
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I only Vote My Conscience for artesianal candidates.
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I like the bespoke ones that we craft at home out of beeswax and pollen, we should share recipes!
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I think it would be fair to hope for better corporate behavior from a news organization* than the average widget monger. Plus, the example you were given was just having a phone number you can contact on their contact page, and literally someone identified as an editorial presence who is a real human being. that’s a pretty low bar, and would still eliminate a lot of the bad actors that are being discussed.
And it’s an easily verifiable fact that the U.S. Secretary of State said that. That’s the fact that was reported. That’s enough to be reputable as a news source. I don’t think anyone is saying Facbook has to go slap the bottle on anthrax out of Colin Powell’s hand and run it down to the lab. The fake news being discussed doesn’t even rise to the level of having an official to quote. The quotes are fabricated from whole cloth.
Finally, would it give you any greater peace of mind if Facebook were to be totally transparent about what they filter out and why? By, say freely releasing data on what stories and news orgs were blacklisted from the news feed (again, not from individuals sharing with each other, that’s not what’s being argued here) and why? Not that they would, but I’m wondering what your line is.
*Take my arguments with a grain of salt, though. I’ll go full disclosure here and admit I’m of the opinion that it would be fine to limit the whitelist to only registered nonprofit news orgs; we could do a lot worse than to get all of our news from ProPublica.
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Hope springs eternal.
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Heheh.
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That is precisely my point, lie told by a person holding an official post would still pass this sort of a filter and would still be able to influence public opinion.
On other hand any news published by any group not able to meet whichever standars FB sets will be automatically flagged, true or not. Danger is even bigger as these standards are likely to be opaque as FB or any corporate entity is not likely to make every detail of their algorithm public.
I fear that this could essentially label any grassroot movement or any emerging news source, first hand eye witness reports, citizen journalists etc. not to mention any opinion piece not tied to precise and easily verifiable event.
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