A reader wrote while I was ill and I forgot to follow up until now:
Read an article on Facebook that they were going to stop news lie’s from being posted on Facebook by individuals.
They have worked something with Snopes and a couple of other web sites that check whether the information to be posted is not the truth but a lie and Facebook will not allow it to be posted. The example given was how Irish were brought to the United States as slaves.
I’ve seen a couple of these, including the Irish mentioned above, and were all lies as I checked it on Snopes too. So many people are out there lying about US history and posting other fables.
Very interesting. Censorship as a couple of people have already complained? Maybe a fine line? Do individuals have the right to publish misinformation/lies that is knowingly not true to be published on Facebook? Censorship?
I was unable to find the cited article, but it seems a reasonable response. I wonder if this is, or will be, a semantic approach or a statistical approach.
In my view, censorship is the government imposed repression and/or transmutation of news; since this appears to be entirely a private, voluntary venture by Facebook and its partners, I don’t see “censorship” applying. Of course, some folks who have found Facebook and other social media to be a convenient gutter for channeling their effluvia, and, being habituated, may think it’s their right to continue.
It’s not.
But they’ll yell and scream and use scurrilous curses (“liberal media” will no doubt come popping out, thus marking the emitters as impotent political warriors of limited imagination), never thinking that Facebook, as a private enterprise, is offering its product under its own terms, and if they don’t like it, they can go find someone else. Since we’re talking about truth vs lies, maybe they can form a new company named LiarsNet and see how well that works out for them.
In the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see if this initiative actually gets off the ground, and how well it works out.
