Zuckerberg, FB, and disinformation

 Until  corporate media and the neoliberal establishment refused to acknowledge  their direct role in the election of Donald Trump and threw a  temper-tantrum about misinformation on social media to scapegoat blame.  

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg balked at the notion faulty reports  circulating on social media had anything at all to do with the November  8th shocker. “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99 percent of what  people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and  hoaxes,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post to his platform last Saturday. “The  hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to  politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the  outcome of this election in one direction or the other.” 

Now, rather than stand by that original assertion, Zuckerberg instead cast all logic aside and unleashed a Machiavellian seven-point plan to eradicate the “very small amount”  of false information — read: all opinion not in lock step with the  establishment narrative — from the newsfeeds of Facebook’s billion-plus  users. Because, apparently, we can’t be trusted to think for ourselves. “The bottom line is: we take misinformation seriously,” Zuckerberg wrote late Friday evening, apparently forgetting what he posted exactly one week ago. “Our  goal is to connect people with the stories they find most meaningful,  and we know people want accurate information. 

We’ve been working on this  problem for a long time and we take this responsibility seriously.  We’ve made significant progress, but there is more work to be done.” Curiously, the head of the Facebook Ministry of Truth neglected to explain how the 65 corporate presstitutes and myriad mendacious mainstream outlets exposed in Wikileaks’ Podesta Files for colluding  with the Clintonite establishment were awarded a free pass to spread  propagandic disinformation — and, frequently, flagrant lies.  Worse, what Zuckerberg wrote next  should send chills down the spines of anyone who has ever been forced to  deal with fallout from the social media platform’s already-rampant and  oft-inexplicable censorship via erroneous and revenge reporting on  posts, arbitrary unpublishing of pages, ghosting, and newsfeed  suppression — as well as those who look to Facebook for alternatives to  vapid mainstream media:

 “Historically, we have relied on our community to help us understand what is fake and what is not. Anyone on Facebook can report any link as false, and we use signals from those reports along with a number of others — like people sharing links to myth-busting sites such as Snopes — to understand which stories we can confidently classify as misinformation. Similar to clickbait, spam and scams, we penalize this content in News Feed so it’s much less likely to spread.” 

Snopes? 

Really? 

The same Snopes that took it upon itself to “debunk” an inside joke in meme form that happened to go viral? In just those three sentences,  Zuckerberg does more to expose the innate perils of censorship than any  scholarly tome on the subject ever could — personal opinion always  operates the censor’s heavy hand. 

It’s inescapable fact that what one  individual deems devoid of value, another may find sacrilegiously  offensive — while another may laugh off as innocuous. Dismissing that scripture — or,  perhaps, forgetting it formed the foundation for First Amendment  protections of free speech, press, and expression — Zuckerberg laid out  his plan to combat the ‘relatively small percentage of misinformation,’  encompassing the following points:  

1. Stronger detection. The most  important thing we can do is improve our ability to classify  misinformation. This means better technical systems to detect what  people will flag as false before they do it themselves.
2. Easy reporting. Making it much easier for people to report stories as fake will help us catch more misinformation faster.
3. Third party verification. There are many respected fact checking organizations and, while we have reached out to some, we plan to learn from many more.
4. Warnings. We are exploring labeling  stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our  community, and showing warnings when people read or share them.
5. Related articles quality. We are raising the bar for stories that appear in related articles under links in News Feed.
6. Disrupting fake news economics. A  lot of misinformation is driven by financially motivated spam. We’re  looking into disrupting the economics with ads policies like the one we  announced earlier this week, and better ad farm detection.
7. Listening. We will continue to work  with journalists and others in the news industry to get their input, in  particular, to better understand their fact checking systems and learn  from them.

In  other words, apart from spam detection, which other websites and  platforms have effectively combatted for years, Facebook’s plan to  ‘detect’ misinformation will be based on what any idiot says. Although  the people of this planet generally operate from a place of honesty and  integrity, let’s face it, humans have nasty penchants for retribution,  revenge, sanctimonious arrogance, self-righteousness, misjudgment,  mischaracterization, hyperbole, and — most imperatively — making  mistakes. 

Relying on people’s personal  assessments of possibly-false news items as the primary driver of what  deserves to be branded with a Scarlet Letter “F” is a system destined to  fail everyone before it even begins. Facebook still does not provide the  means to rebut post and link removals or the sudden unpublishing of  pages — the platform has, in essence, a shoot first, ask questions later  attitude when it receives a report something violated its Community  Standards. This has already imperiled owners of perfectly legitimate  pages with millions of fans to the arduous process of challenging  unjustified reports and coping in the meantime with devastating loss of  revenue.  

Nowhere in Friday’s announcement does  Zuckerberg address those concerns — which will exponentially increase  if and when the plan begins. With little to no recourse to defend  against what will undoubtedly be an explosion of posts erroneously  flagged as ‘false information,’ Facebook is brazenly handing over the  censor’s black marker to a populace already too lackadaisical to bother  investigating questionable news items. 

Therein lies the greatest threat to a  free press and free speech this country has seen since Red Scare  McCarthyism — Facebook, backed by a polarized public, will be the  arbiter of acceptable thought — and those who dare question or criticize  that thought will pay with their livelihoods. Far worse, everyone will pay the price of lost access to information. 

We’re already starting to.